Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has surpassed Jeff Bezos as the world’s second richest person.

Zuckerberg’s net worth reached $206.2 billion on Thursday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, topping the $205.1 billion net worth of the former Amazon CEO and president. The Facebook co-founder now trails Tesla chief Elon Musk by roughly $50 billion, the index showed.

With his 13% stake in Meta, Zuckerberg’s net-worth has risen by $78 billion since the beginning of the year, which is more than any member of the of the 500 richest people that the Bloomberg Index tracks. Meta shares closed at a record high on Thursday at $582.77, representing a roughly 68% jump from early January when its shares were trading at $346.29.

Zuckerberg’s rise to the second spot on the index on Thursday underscores how his personal wealth has grown alongside investor enthusiasm over the social media giant’s rising profits this year.

Wall Street has continuously cheered Meta throughout 2024 as the company has consistently reported quarterly earnings that have surpassed analyst estimates. In July, Meta said that its second-quarter sales grew 22% to $39.07 billion, marking the fourth straight quarter of revenue growth topping 20%.

Meta has pointed to its hefty artificial intelligence investments as helping improve the performance of its online advertising platform as a reason for its sales growth. The company’s online advertising system suffered a major setback in 2021 when Apple introduced an iOS privacy update that weakened its ability to track users across the web. Meta in February 2022 said that the privacy changes would cost it $10 billion in revenue.

In late 2022, Zuckerberg instituted a major cost-cutting plan that extended into the next year and ultimately resulted in 21,000 Meta workers losing their jobs, or roughly a quarter of the company’s workforce.

Investors reacted favorably to Meta’s cost cutting while the company’s online advertising business began to rebound and was bolstered by the massive digital ad spending campaigns by Chinese-linked retailers Temu and Shien.

While Meta has continued spending billions of dollars on the virtual and augmented reality technologies needed to underpin the futuristic concept of the metaverse, investors have become more tolerant of the investments as long as the company’s core ad business remains healthy.

Last week, Meta debuted its Orion AR glasses, which garnered positive reviews from the few people who have tested the prototype.

Watch: CNBC reviews Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype

The price of the XRP token tumbled Thursday, a day after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed to appeal a 2023 court ruling that determined XRP is not considered a security when sold to retail investors on exchanges.

XRP was last lower by more than 9% at 52 cents a coin, according to Coin Metrics.

Ripple, the largest holder of XRP coins, scored a partial victory last summer after a three-year battle with the SEC. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres handed down the decision, which was hailed as a landmark win for the crypto industry. Still, while XRP isn’t considered a security when sold to retail investors on exchanges, it is considered an unregistered security offering if sold to institutional investors.

Ripple declined to comment but referred to Wednesday evening posts on X by CEO Brad Garlinghouse and chief legal officer Stuart Alderoty.

Alderoty said the company is evaluating whether to file a cross appeal, and called the SEC’s decision to appeal “disappointing, but not surprising.” The SEC, under Chair Gary Gensler, has become notorious for its refusal to provide clear guidance for crypto businesses, instead opting to regulate by enforcement actions.

“XRP’s status as a non-security is the law of the land today – and that does not change even in the face of this misguided – and infuriating – appeal,” Garlinghouse said on X.

Earlier on Wednesday, Bitwise Asset Management, an issuer of ETFs tracking bitcoin (BITB) and ether (ETHW), submitted a registration filing for what would be the first XRP ETF – two days after registering an XRP trust product in Delaware. Grayscale, which also has bitcoin (GBTC) and ether (ETHE) ETFs, introduced a similar trust product in September.

XRP, which was created by the founders of Ripple, is the native token of the open source XRP Ledger, which Ripple uses in its cross-border payments business. It is the fifth-largest coin by market cap, excluding stablecoins Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC).

Elsewhere in the crypto market, bitcoin hovered above the flat line at $60,210.29, while ether fell more than 2% to $2,320.20. Crypto stocks Coinbase and MicroStrategy were lower by about 1% and 2%, respectively.                                   

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime” that demand for the company’s next-generation artificial intelligence chip Blackwell is “insane.”

“Everybody wants to have the most and everybody wants to be first,” Huang said during the interview, which aired on Wednesday. Shares of Nvidia were up about 3% on Thursday morning.

Blackwell, expected to cost between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit, is in hot demand from companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and other firms building AI data centers to power products like ChatGPT and Copilot.

Nvidia has been the main beneficiary of the artificial intelligence boom, with shares up about 150% year-to-date. The company’s revenue continued to surge during the fiscal second quarter to $30.04 billion, up 122% on an annual basis. It expects $32.5 billion in sales during the current quarter.

“At a time when the technology is moving so fast, it gives us an opportunity to triple down, to really drive the innovation cycle so that we can increase capabilities, increase our throughput, decrease our costs, decrease our energy consumption,” Huang told CNBC. “We’re on a path to do that, and everything’s on track.”

Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said in August that the company expects to ship several billion dollars in Blackwell revenue in the company’s fourth fiscal quarter.

Jensen said Nvidia plans to update its AI platform each year to increase performance by two to three times.