7 January 2021: Elon Musk becomes the world's richest person
A surging Tesla share price pushed Elon Musk past Jeff Bezos on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the richest person on the planet. Tesla had gone from near bankruptcy fears to a market value larger than several major carmakers combined, despite building a small fraction of their cars. Whether that valuation was genius or froth depended on whom you asked. The scoreboard, at least for that day, did not care.
The lesson: Markets pay for the future they imagine, which is why paper fortunes can swing so violently.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Tesla at the start of 2020 → $12,500 today, vs $2,092 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2020, the latest year on the wheel. That is 12.5 times the money, and $10,408 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Tesla teaches: The biggest winners often look absurdly overvalued at every stage; holding them requires tolerating repeated drawdowns that would shake out most investors.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $14.00 | $25,000 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $21.00 | $16,667 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $28.00 | $12,500 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Tesla? Every starting year and the full story →
More Tesla history
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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