The wind of fortune blew Tesla’s stock to shoot CEO Elon Musk up to the top of the billionaires’ leaderboard once again on Monday. Tesla’s stock surged to Musk’s worth at $200 billion, making him the third person ever to hit that record, Forbes reports.

Since June, Tesla has been on a high profit ride that has seen its shares closing up 2.2% at $791.36, the highest they’ve been since February this year. Following the electric vehicle’s rally, Musk added $3.8 billion to his fortune on Monday, putting his worth at $203.4 billion at the close of markets.

Musk’s new milestone comes after his billionaire and space shuttle rival, Jeff Bezos suffered a $1 billion loss due to a 0.6% stock decline in his e-commerce company Amazon. Now Bezos has fallen behind Musk in the billionaires’ index.

Musk is now the third person to reach the $200 billion threshold. Bezos hit the mark in August last year, while the third person on the list, luxury magnate Bernard Arnault, briefly hit the record in September.

Forbes report explained how Musk attained the billionaires’ elite status now, and why not in the past when Tesla’s stock was above $700.

Musk is richer now than he was at Tesla’s peak in January—when he briefly became the world’s richest tycoon for the first time—because he’s received additional stock option grants that have increased his stake in Tesla; he has about 73.5 million Tesla options worth about $53 billion. Musk owns more than one-fifth of Tesla; Forbes discounts a portion of this stake to account for shares he has pledged as collateral for loans.

Musk’s fortune is heavily tied to his ownership of Tesla, which ended the day Monday with a market cap of more than $792 billion, and SpaceX, which was valued at $74 billion after a funding round in February. After promising last year that he would ditch almost all his personal possessions, including six mansions, he now owns one house and counts his primary residence to be a 400-square foot rental unit.

Shares in Tesla rocketed up more than 720% in 2020, helping to increase Musk’s net worth by more than $125 billion in a year. After trading places with Bezos as the world’s richest person for several days in January, Tesla stock began to decline. By April, Musk was surpassed by Arnault as well.

The unusually frequent shuffling atop the billionaire leaderboard continued last month, when Musk became second richest again, trailing only Bezos.

Musk’s wealth is expected to increase soon following the launch of Tesla’s gigafactory in Berlin. Musk said the company will begin production of its Model Y cars before the year ends. The factory is expected to produce between 5,000 and 10,000 vehicles weekly by the end of 2022.

“We’re aiming to start production in a few months, basically, November or December, and hopefully deliver our first cars in December,” said Musk at the launch of the gigafactory.

Tesla said the Berlin factory will aim to produce up to 500,000 cars a year and have 12,000 employees at the plant.

Africa’s startup ecosystems are worth a total of $6.6 billion with cities of Cape Town, Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Accra accounting for $6 billion, according to Global Start-up Ecosystem Report 2021 (GSER 2021), compiled by Startup Genome and the Global Entrepreneurship Network.

The 2021 GSER is based on the assessment of 275 ecosystems across more than 100 countries. The report analyses and evaluates the start-up ecosystems based on experience and talent, performance, funding, market reach, and resource attraction.

Fintech remains one of the major sectors in Africa.

Meanwhile, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigeria’s payment system has received around $500 million in investments between 2015 and 2020. That is indeed amazing. We are in the application utility era and right at the infancy stage. Tomorrow looks very promising in the startup scene.

“The high level of confidence in our payment system, between 2015 and 2020, has attracted the investment of about $500m in firms run by Nigerian founders.

“Studies have already shown that only 1% of fintechs have been critically affected by COVID-19 and 2% severely affected. By comparison, around 17 per cent of other high-growth companies fall into these categories. It is therefore unsurprising that many fintechs have experienced a surge in demand as working practices and customer banking habits changed.

“As a country with one of the largest millennial population in the world – an estimated 62 per cent of the Nigerian population below 25 years of age, fast smartphone growth driven by increasing affordability and increasing mobile penetration and fast transition to 5G technology – Nigeria remains primed to be an active playground for digital transformation and cannot afford to ignore.”

Nigeria’s fintech boom has seen a lot of payments startups rise to the top from scratch in the shortest period of time that could only be imagined in the past. And as the days go by, we see more fintechs create new records of faster growth.

Mono, a Nigeria-based financial data startup, announced on Monday that it has raised a $15 million Series A round.

The round was led by Tiger Global, a venture capital firm that has invested in Flutterwave and FairMoney earlier this year, and new investors; Target Global, General Catalyst and SBI Investment. Also participating are existing investors including Entree Capital, Lateral Capital, GPIC, Acuity VC and Ingressive Capital.

Mono has recorded a series of fundraising rounds, which added to the Series A round, puts its capital above $17 million.

The startup raised a seed round of $2 million from a number of investors including Entrée Capital, Lateral Capital, and Babs Ogundeyi, co-founder and CEO of Kuda, in May. That’s in addition to the $500,000 it raised in September 2020 and the $125,000 received as part of the Winter 21 cohort of Y Combinator.

Founded in 2020 by Abdul Hassan and Prakhar Singh, Mono offers open banking solutions, helping businesses and individuals to access financial data from commercial banks.

The new investment will help Mono to expand its services to other African countries. Already in Ghana, it targets new markets in Sub-Saharan countries including Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa. Mono said expansion into these new markets will take effect from 2021.

This coming a few days after Payday, a payment startup announced that it has secured $1 million in pre-seed funding to build a platform to enable swift global payments for Africans.

The investment, which was led by LoftyInc Capital, Microtraction, Magic Fund, Ventures Platform, Voltron Capital, CcHub Syndicate, Helicarrier Inc, Greencap Equity, Midlothian Angel Network, Emergence Capital, Olugbenga Agboola (GB); also has many individual participants. They include Charles Odita, Eke Eleanya, Adegoke Olubusi, Edmund Olotu (Bloc), Prosper Otemuyiwa (Eden), Dimeji Sofowora, Perseus Mlambo (Union54), Abdul Hassan (Mono), and Onyekachukwu Somtochukwu Eyisi.

Founded in June 2021 by Favour Ori, Payday offers cross-border payment services that accommodates various transactions, including virtual cards and tuition fees. The startup said it has processed over $2m in transactions within 11 weeks.

The startup said the swiftness and affordability of its services beat that of other payment services. According to Payday, you can receive your cash in less than 1 minute!

Commenting on the funding, the CEO Favour Ori said: “Payday will expand into new territories and also hire talents for their Engineering, Product, Compliance and Growth roles to scale its operations and also acquire additional licenses”

Emerging startups in the Nigerian fintech space are figuring out frictions and fixing them, thereby speeding up the pace of their growth.

For instance, Mono’ services means businesses can now link the companies with their apps to fetch transactions, statements, balance, income, and identity data. The result of the new idea has been rapid growth.

“A year ago, we launched Mono, and we’ve grown rapidly since. Our vision to power businesses with access to financial data and direct bank payments has progressed with a lot of learning,” the company said in a statement.

Very excited to share that one of our companies has been accepted into Y Combinator, the category-king Silicon Valley-based accelerator. It is still private and that means I cannot share the name. Our goal is simple: nurture and support startups in/out of Africa so that in every cycle of YC or Techstars, we have representatives. We are running the numbers very well.

Tekedia Capital – funding the NEXT Africa; join our Syndicate here. The next investment cycle begins next week.

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