Tesla shares closed the session on Thursday, January 07, 2021 with an advance of 7.94 %, to $816.99, placing the company's capitalization at about $773,000 million (see graph), compared to just over 765,000 million Facebook, which on Friday gained 2.06 %.
Its recent inclusion in the S&P 500 Index on Monday, December 21, 2020, helped.
Thanks to this, its founder and CEO, Elon Musk, also surpassed Amazon's boss, Jeff Bezos, as the richest person in the world on Thursday, according to the real-time listing prepared by Bloomberg.
Musk has seen his fortune multiply over the last year, with a rise of more than 150,000 million dollars thanks to the "rally" on Wall Street Tesla, which owns about 20% of the shareholders, in addition to options worth about 42,000 million dollars.
Only Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google exceed the market value of the manufacturer of electric vehicles right now.
Elon Musk is the richest man in the world
Elon Musk's wealth rose to $189.7 billion dollars, making him the richest person on the planet after surpassing Jeff Bezos.
Musk initially surpassed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (worth $96.9 billion) to become the fourth richest person in the world in early November, then surpassed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (currently worth $122 billion).
A month later, Musk surpassed French luxury magnate Bernard Arnault (with a current value of $154.8 billion dollars) to become the second richest person in the world.
Tesla's CEO has added 165 billion dollars to his fortune since March 2020, when he was worth 24.6 billion dollars. Much of that increase is due to Tesla's skyrocketing share price, which rose more than 720% in 2020. It has gained another 20% in the first week of 2021.
Not all that glitters at Tesla is gold
Tesla finally reaches almost 500,000 deliveries, two years behind its promise, for a global market share of... 0.7% but Tesla's market capitalization is greater than the combined total of Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, GM, BMW, Honda, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler.
Tesla announced on Saturday, January 6, that it finally almost reached 500,000 deliveries in a calendar year, with its 499,550 vehicles delivered worldwide in 2020, and that it finally reached its goal of producing 500,000 vehicles per year, two years later than promised. In May 2016, it had promised in its quarterly report that it would produce 500,000 vehicles in 2018.
Each promise Tesla and Musk make increases the company's market capitalization by billions of dollars, allowing the company to raise billions of dollars by selling more shares in capital increases. In 2020 alone, it raised $12.3 billion through this procedure, in addition to the $20 billion it had raised since its initial public offering.
This 500,000 worldwide deliveries is a large number for Tesla, but it is a miniscule figure in the global automotive market, which is estimated at 73 million deliveries in 2020. Tesla's share of the global market in 2020 has reached 0.7%.
Tesla is not even among the top 20 automakers. It is a small car manufacturer, it is growing, and that is good especially in a year like 2020, but it is very small. One day, Tesla could reach a global market share of 1%.
However, it must be acknowledged that Tesla achieved a great feat, it got car manufacturers to take electric vehicles (EVs) seriously, now traditional car manufacturers are investing billions of dollars each in EVs. Volkswagen alone has allocated 86 billion dollars over the next five years to EVs and prices are falling.
Tesla has cut prices throughout 2020 to remain competitive. This has resulted for the first time in the creation of a real market for EVs, with a lot of innovation and price pressures everywhere.
