Elon Musk has become the first person to reach a net worth of $500bn, bringing the Tesla chief executive halfway to trillionaire status.

Musk’s wealth temporarily crossed the half-trillion mark on Wednesday before retreating to $499bn, according to the Forbes billionaires list.

Musk owns 12% of Tesla, which is worth more than $1.5tn, and his wealth has been boosted this year by surge in the electric carmaker’s share price.

  • crandlecan@mander.xyz
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    10 hours ago

    What happened with Tesla enduring mass boycots and losses due to Tittler’s involvement with Agent Orange? 😔

    • redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 hours ago

      TSLA is heavily manipulated. Insiders have liquidated something like 100M in stock this year. They’re dead it just takes time, they don’t have a market for any vehicles anymore, the CT was a boondoggle, they have no new tech and are behind in every category now.

      Nissan is still operating, give it some time, people will continue to dump TSLA and Elon can’t liquidate more than a couple billion in a year without tanking the price.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      For some weird reason it hasn’t affected the Tesla stock much?
      FSD is now a proven fiasco, together with obvious declining sales. But now people are buying the next big thing which is supposed to be his amateur robots and AI.
      Both areas where Tesla is even further behind than they are on FSD. But some people still refuse to believe Tesla is behind on FSD, despite the evidence is clear that they are.
      It’s all build on a scam, and a lot of people are still buying it.
      Elon Musk is not a genius at technology or business, he is just a genius scammer.

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        People are buying only because it’s a growth stock. Eventually enough people will get nervous and cause a stampede. Lots of owners are going to left holding the bag, an empty bag.

    • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      I’ve maintained that the stock market divorced itself from reality a long time ago. As of making this comment by market cap Toyota, BYD, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, GM, Volkswagen, Ford, and Porsche COMBINED are worth $100 billion less than HALF of Tesla. Is there anyone out there that would choose a minority stake in Tesla vs owning 9 of the biggest auto manufacturers on the planet outright?

      Point being I don’t see stock valuation as a measure of how successful companies are. How high were stocks in the dot com boom? In 2008?

      • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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        9 hours ago

        Stocks are basically the same as crypto at this point. There is no benefit or utility at owning some, the only value is the idea of selling for more at some point.

        • reddig33@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          They could fix this by requiring stocks pay a dividend as a minimum percentage of profit, and prohibiting the sale of a stock until a year after purchase.

      • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        The majority of investors now are “retail investors”. Just regular people on apps like Robinhood. These people are investing in memes or making political statements.

        • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyz
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          8 hours ago

          Tesla is 47.91% owned by institutions, not retail. Add Musk’s 12%, and that leaves retail at most 40%.

          Tesla goes where institutions want it to go, since they are the only organised force on the market anyway.

        • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          I’m not trying to start a fight with you on this but by what metric do you measure that? To my knowledge institutional trading outpaces retail in terms of total dollars invested, number of trades, and total valuation (as in the total market value of the retail traders is more than the net worth of retail investors)

          • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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            7 hours ago

            I can’t find the source. I’m recalling a recent episode of TBOY podcast that talked about this. They cite their sources, but I’m not sure which episode it was. So, yeah without actual sources feel free to ignore what I said.

      • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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        4 hours ago

        Shockingly, boycotts don’t work if the actual customers don’t take part in them. Companies don’t care about your feelings, they care about money, and “I’m never buying a thing because of reasons!” doesn’t matter if you weren’t about to buy one in the first place.

        • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          Correct. That’s why successful boycotts usually only happen because the company was already in decline. I would argue that the Disney/ABC situation was that.

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
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        8 hours ago

        Did you miss the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing? Disney cancelled him so people started cancelling their Disney subscriptions. Suddenly they reconsidered.

        Boycotts don’t always work, sure, but sometimes they do and that’s enough to prove that they’re worth trying in the first place.