Posted on 07/23/2020 4:20:37 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
Elon Musk's meteoric rise up the Forbes Billionaire List has continued this month, as he’s ascended past luminaries such as Warren Buffett and Steve Ballmer. As of Monday afternoon, Musk's net worth surpassed $74 billion, meaning he is now the fifth-richest person on the planet.
Musk first debuted on Forbes’ 400 Wealthiest Americans List in 2012 in 190th place with a net worth of $2.4 billion. On January 1 this year, he was the 37th richest person on earth. However, Tesla's sudden and spectacular rise has propelled him near the very top of the world's wealthiest humans. Tesla's surge has confounded some investors, considering it’s far smaller than its competitors and only recently began to log quarterly profits. Tesla produced 103,000 vehicles in the first quarter; Toyota produced 2.4 million vehicles during that same period. In 2019, American automakers General Motors and Ford generated ten times more sales than Tesla. Late last month, analysts from Morgan Stanley warned that Tesla stock, which was trading at roughly $1,000 per share at that time, was "grossly overvalued and set to plunge." Earlier this month, Musk said that Tesla would produce virtually fully autonomous self-driving vehicles by the end of 2020, a claim that was met with skepticism by an auto industry accustomed to a heaping of hype from Musk on the capabilities of self-driving technology. Musk has not sold shares of Tesla since 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Musk, like Steve Jobs, has focused on maximizing gross profit on each unit, NOT overall volume.
Not bad for an African immigrant...
Hey black lives do matter. :)
He is now the richest African American.
And they say we’re racists...
So has he paid back the Five Billion dollars that us taxpayers gave him? With interest of course?
“Tesla produced 103,000 vehicles in the first quarter; Toyota produced 2.4 million vehicles during that same period”
Investors betting that electric vehicles will supplant gasoline vehicles soon.
Toyota etc have little room for growth, market being saturated.
Tesla has room for 100x growth, supplanting an entire industry with new tech.
(100x: replace 10 competitors building 10x cars each. Currently, Tesla is the only viable EV manufacturer; rest are either existing co.s making half-baked attempts based on regulatory obligations, or startups facing impossibly long odds.)
The looming announcement of EVs built to million-mile specs will be an enormous win. I’m in the market for a pickup: do I get the gas truck with $100k total cost of ownership and will die by 250,000 miles, or the Cybertruck with $100k total cost of ownership and will run 4x longer?
Tesla stock seems impossibly high; so did Apple and other now-juggernauts at one point.
That’s interesting. Short squeeze, a natural confluence of a fundamentally good growing company vs insane shorting vs black-swan market crash.
I expect we must be near the peak of this hype cycle. Musk himself opined the stock was too high (which hiccuped, then charged ahead). We’ve been waiting for something to wipe out the short holders, and recovery from a black-swan crash certainly sparked it.
Which all ... points to Tesla being a solid prospect. Betting on believable risk led to lots of buying shorts; those shorts all failing in such massive numbers for so long indicates the company isn’t going to fail, nay they are positioned to take a big bite out of an enormous industry.
This short squeeze might spike the stock price, then crash it, but there’s still a solid prospect making progress toward industry domination/replacement. When the price drops for want of more losing shorts, will be time to buy more Tesla stock.
BTW: Apple, which also nearly died at one point, continues its long rise. It too has room to dominate an entire industry.
“So has he paid back the Five Billion dollars that us taxpayers gave him?”
Yes.
One year he personally wrote a check to the IRS for $2.5B. That was just one year.
For once the subsidies laws (if you don’t like them, take it up with your legislator - not Musk) worked as intended and had a net taxpayer benefit.
(I disapprove of such legislation as unconstitutional, but insofar as it nonetheless exists, it has worked well for this case.)
“Tesla Motors announced Wednesday that it has repaid a $465 million loan from the government nearly a decade before it was scheduled to do so.”
https://money.cnn.com/2013/05/22/autos/tesla-loan-repayment/index.html
“Still, there is a price, and that number is $55m for a seat on SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsule, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, compared to roughly $90m for a seat on Roscosmos’ Soyuz rocket. “
https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/10/russias_space_agency_spat/
He may not be my favorite person but. good for him - he has earned it
“ The looming announcement of EVs built to million-mile specs will be an enormous win.”
As will the announcement of cold fusion and a working flux capacitor.
Keep telling yourself that before you go to sleep.
Wasn’t there talk of Apple working on their own electric cars a few years back?
Check the news September 16.
You may find some interesting relevant information then.
Talk, yes, all rumors of secret projects.
As an Apple and EV fanboy, I find it unlikely Apple will make an electric car - unless somehow they can make it very thin. I suspect it was just researching exotic future tech for potential product lines. Very large companies often do extreme R&D.
“ Check the news September 16.
You may find some interesting relevant information then.”
Like the headline “physics overruled by wishing”???
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