Femi Ashekun/
Elon Musk’s fortune swelled to a whopping $214.8 billion this week, increasing by $12.7 billion as Tesla stock posted steady gains every day and rose 7.3% from Monday to Friday to cross $800 per share for the first time since February.
According to Forbes, Tesla outperformed the S&P 500’s 1.8% increase this week, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average also gained 1.6%, fueled by a strong finish to the week on Thursday and Friday.
Tesla stock has surged nearly 50% since May 19 as the electric carmaker continues to deliver vehicles in record numbers.
The company said in early October that it delivered 241,300 cars in the second quarter, and this week it revealed it sold 56,000 cars in China in September from its Shanghai production facility, 12,000 more than it did in August. Jefferies raised its price target on Tesla shares to $950 leading up to its third quarter earnings report next Wednesday.
Relative to other carmakers, Tesla’s car sales are quite small; in the U.S. alone, Ford sold 4.2 million cars last year and Toyota sold 9.5 million; the combined market value of those two companies is dwarfed by Tesla’s $844 billion market capitalization.
The boom times made Musk richer than Jeff Bezos in late September and pushed his net worth past $200 billion for the first time. He’s having fun with the competition. After telling Forbes he would send Bezos a silver medal upon his ascent to the top spot, he followed through on that promise on Monday by replying to one of Bezos’ tweets with a silver medal emoji.
Although Musk widened the gap this week, Bezos still got $5.6 billion richer on Friday with Amazon stock rising 3.3%.
Since stepping down as CEO of Amazon in July, Bezos has spent more time in the public eye promoting his commercial spaceflight company Blue Origin, and he was on site to celebrate this week when 90-year-old actor William Shatner became the oldest person ever to fly into space on its New Shepard spacecraft.
The only person whose week was almost as prosperous as Musk’s was French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault. He gained $10.5 billion after his LVMH conglomerate reported third-quarter sales of $18 billion (15.5 billion euros), boosting its stock by 6.1% for the week.
Arnault remains the third-richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $185.4 billion.
The strong week for luxury goods and cosmetics also made Arnault’s French compatriots François Pinault (of Kering) and Françoise Bettencourt Meyers (of L’Oréal) billions of dollars richer.
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