Tesla, the world leader in electric cars, broke the $ 1 trillion (861 billion euros) mark in market capitalization on Monday, October 25. The firm developed by Elon Musk joins the club of American giants who have crossed this threshold: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and Facebook, which has since fallen. All are digital companies, with Tesla increasingly expanding into automatic driving – software for this is sold as an option for $ 10,000. Its electric vehicles have sometimes been called “iPhone on wheels”.
“Wild $ T1mes!” “, Elon Musk tweeted, pun between the “trillion dollars” reached and “turbulent times”. His fortune grew by $ 25 billion in the day to reach $ 255 billion, according to the real-time calculator of Forbes. He became the richest man in the world ahead of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, whose fortune is estimated at 194 billion.
The trillion mark was crossed after the car rental company Hertz, which went bankrupt at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, announced that it would buy 100,000 electric vehicles from the manufacturer. Tesla shares rose 12.6% during the day. Facetious minds note that a contract worth roughly $ 4 billion for Tesla sent the company’s value soaring to more than $ 100 billion.
100 times Renault
Elon Musk’s firm is worth more than any company in the industry. In July 2020, it had overtaken the Japanese Toyota, which is now worth $ 280 billion, almost four times less, while Volkswagen, number one in Europe, weighs only $ 150 billion. Tesla is 100 times worth Renault, which has a market capitalization of less than 10 billion euros.
“Tesla is now worth the combined market capitalization of the following ten automakers. Who can still doubt that capitalism is turning green (with the usual excesses)? “ French economist Jean Pisani-Ferry wonders on Twitter. “We will be among the first tour operators to offer Tesla for hire # ecological transition”, adds Jean-François Rial, CEO of the Voyageurs du monde tourism group.
Tesla, which sold more than 500,000 vehicles in 2020, could reach 900,000 this year and is targeting 1.4 million by 2022, thanks to its new factories in Shanghai, Texas and Berlin. It has so far managed to withstand the shortage of microprocessors.
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