Elon Musk: Space enthusiast, technoking of Tesla, enthusiastic tweeter, meme connoisseur — and, now, the richest man on the planet, as the Tesla stock price also just hit an all-time high.
Plotted on a graph, the share price of his electric carmaker Tesla since early last year has produced the kind of image that pretty much every CEO hopes to see, a line that more or less slopes up and to the right. As a result of Tesla shares also spiking more than 12% this week alone upon word that Hertz is ordering 100,000 Teslas to expand its electric vehicle rental fleet by the end of next year, Musk added more than $36 billion to his personal fortune. As of the time of this writing, he’s the richest man in the world. He might even break a record soon along those lines — being the first person whose net worth reaches $300 billion.
Tesla stock goes on a tear
One of the striking things about the degree to which Musk’s personal wealth expanded this week is that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index pegged it as the biggest single-day growth in the history of the index. No doubt equally delicious, perhaps more so, is that Musk is also now much wealthier than the erstwhile richest man on the planet. That would be Musk’s space industry rival, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
If all of this still doesn’t fully convey the extent of Musk’s wealth? Consider that his fortune now also exceeds the market cap of Toyota, one of the biggest carmakers in the world. Speaking of market cap, Tesla’s own now exceeds $1 trillion.
Naturally, Musk had to tweet out a message in celebration to his more than 61 million followers:
Wild $T1mes!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 25, 2021
Tesla news
In other Tesla headlines, Uber says it’s looking to include 50,000 Teslas as part of its ridesharing platform. “Starting November 1,” Uber announced on Wednesday, “drivers can rent Teslas through Hertz’s rental program in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Washington, DC, with a nationwide expansion in the following weeks.
“This will expose more consumers to the EV experience than ever, as riders who use Uber start seeing Teslas more frequently throughout the holidays.”
Also fueling investor enthusiasm around Tesla at the moment? The quarterly profit the company posted in recent days. It was, in fact, the third such consecutive quarterly profit, driven, no pun intended, by strong deliveries. In the third quarter, Tesla set a record as far as those go. The company said it delivered 241,300 electric vehicles around the world during the third quarter. That’s a 73% improvement over the year-ago period.
“In the third quarter, we produced approximately 238,000 vehicles and delivered over 240,000 vehicles,” the company noted in a press release. “We would like to thank our customers for their patience as we work through global supply chain and logistics challenges.”
