NEW YORK: Shares of Tesla jumped as much as 5.6 per cent yesterday, pushing the electric carmaker’s market capitalisation to more than $800 billion for the first time ever and inching closer to the trillion dollar club.
Tesla’s stratospheric rally has helped chief executive Elon Musk surpass Amazon boss Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest man, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.
At yesterday’s session high, Musk’s 21pc stake in the carmaker as per Forbes contributes more than $170bn to his net worth, dwarfing the combined market capitalisation of General Motors, Ford Motor and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
In the previous session, Tesla’s market value crossed $774bn, making it Wall Street’s fifth most valuable company, just behind Google-parent Alphabet and ahead of social media giant Facebook.
The company’s fortunes is an anomaly as the 17-year-old carmaker has production that is just a fraction of large rivals by sales such as Toyota Motor, Volkswagen and General Motors.
Meanwhile, Tesla launched a cheaper variant of the Model Y yesterday, bringing its sports utility vehicle’s price closer to that of its Model 3 sedan, the electric-car maker’s least expensive car.
The new standard range Model Y is priced at $41,990, only $4,000 more than the entry level Model 3, according to the company’s website.
Tesla’s new Model Y variants come days after the carmaker beat Wall Street targets for 2020 vehicle deliveries, driven by a steady rise in electric vehicle adoption, but narrowly missed its ambitious full-year target of half a million deliveries.
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