Tesla surpassed facebook in market value as Elon Musk becomes the world’s Richest Man

After Tesla CEO Elon Musk surpassed Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person, the company’s shares surged to exceed Facebook’s stock market value for the first time. Tesla shares on Thursday jumped nearly 8% to a record high in heavy trading to end the session at $816.

Currently, the market capitalization of electric car maker stands at $774 billion, making it Wall Street’s fifth-most-valuable company, just behind Google-parent Alphabet and ahead of Facebook. Meanwhile, the market capitalization of Facebook stands at $765 billion after its shares rose about 2%.

On Thursday, over $39 billion worth of Tesla’s shares were bought and sold during the session, a record for Tesla and more than the next three most traded companies combined, which were Apple, Alibaba Group Holding, and Amazon.com.

The jump in Tesla’s stock price further inflates a valuation light-years apart from other automakers on numerous metrics. Tesla produced just over half-a-million cars last year, a fraction of the output of Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co.

The rise of Elon Musk

Tesla’s share price, which surged 743% last year on the back of consistent profits, inclusion in the S&P 500 Index, and enthusiasm from Wall Street and retail investors alike. The shares have gained more than 23,900% since its 2010 initial public offering, including a 5-for-1 stock split last year.

Currently, Tesla shares are on a 10-day winning streak, the longest since April and only the second time since the 2010 initial public offering it’s gained so many days in a row.

The relentless surge has forced Wall Street into a perpetual game of catch-up, with analysts’ average price target still far below the current stock price. On Thursday, RBC Capital Markets analyst Joseph Spak upgraded Tesla to the equivalent of a hold rating from a previous sell recommendation, saying he got the stock “completely wrong.”

Spak raised his 2025 delivery estimate for Tesla to 1.7 million cars from 1.3 million and said his biggest mistake was underestimating the company’s ability to take advantage of its stock price to raise capital and fund growth or acquisitions. The analyst more than doubled his price target to $700 from $339.

Including Thursday’s gains in Tesla shares, Musk had a net worth of more than $188.5 billion, $1.5 billion more than Bezos, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, a Bloomberg report suggests.

Musk’s rise is even more astonishing given his dust-ups and gaffes in recent years, typically exacerbated by his spontaneous tweets. In 2018 he agreed to pay a $20 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission and step down as chairman of Tesla after tweeting a notion to take the company private at $420 a share, with “funding secured” — something he never did.

On several occasions, Musk has bemoaned being “cash poor.” The vast majority of his net worth is tied up in the equity of his companies, including Tesla — which pays no dividends — and closely held SpaceX and the Boring Company, a tunneling venture. Yet he’s professed to have little interest in the material trappings of wealth.

After reports of his new status were published Thursday, Musk tweeted “How strange,” then added, “Well, back to work.”

He tweeted last year he intended to sell “almost all” his physical possessions and he told German publisher Axel Springer in a December interview that the main purpose of his wealth is to accelerate humanity’s evolution into a spacefaring civilization.

Source:Pmnews

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ikeoluwaibrahim

I'm Ike a freelance editor at Afroconomy who writes harrowing stories that lead my readers on chilling escapes about the knowledge on African Development

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