There was a time when the minute the words "richest person on the earth" came out of somebody, we would immediately remember Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft whose Windows operating system powers more than 85% of the world's computers.

Now however, Jeff Bezos has taken the lead and that too by a considerable amount for the past couple of years. As of January 2019, his net worth stands at a staggering $137 billion while Bill Gates is at $95 billion.

With all that is going on in the different areas of human endeavour, I wonder who will be next candidate for the richest person on the planet a decade or two from now.

To me personally, only one name comes to mind and that is of Elon Musk. Today he has a net worth of about $21 billion and so it might seem quite far-fetched to think he might surpass the others and almost impossible to think that he might be the first to get to a trillion!

The First Trillionaire?

My reasoning is simple and I must admit, not derived by calculations at all. I believe that people who get in at the ground level of a tech or industry that will power the future, are the people most likely to be insanely rich when that future finally arrives.

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are both products of the Internet revolution of the 90s and now that the world is powered by the internet, they are at the top of the foodchain. I think the same will happen with Elon Musk as well. And even more so since he has his fingers in multiple future industries.

Through Tesla, he is involved in leading the electric revolution, whether it be electric autonomous cars and trucks, battery packs for the homes and even electric grids, solar roofs and possibly more in the future. The future is going to be electric, autonomous and driven by batteries and this alone will have a huge impact on Musk's wealth.

Next comes an area wherein people haven't even begun thinking yet. I am talking about private space ventures that SpaceX is undertaking. Elon plans to lay the fundamentals for colonising Mars and making space travel much cheaper, opening up an entirely new venue of human endeavours. He could make as much as he wanted as he is literally helping establish an entirely new planet!

There are other areas like AI and Neuralink where he is expected to make ground-breaking innovation happen and that would add to his net worth as well. With all these efforts, I think he just might become the first trillionaire of the world.