Despite seeing his net worth skyrocket in recent months—and a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-06/musk-close-to-surpassing-bezos-as-world-s-richest-person#:~:text=Elon%20Musk%2C%20the%20outspoken%20entrepreneur,the%20world's%20500%20wealthiest%20people." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">report</a>&nbsp;from Bloomberg on Wednesday that he’s now the world’s richest person—<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?list=rtb/">Elon Musk</a>&nbsp;remains the second-richest person in the world, according to&nbsp;Forbes’ estimates.



Shares of Musk’s electric-vehicle maker Tesla&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/tesla" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TSLA</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/tesla">+6.9%</a>&nbsp;rose by 7% as of 2:30 p.m. EST on Thursday, pushing Musk’s net worth up by $9.8 billion, to $175.2 billion. That makes him $22 billion richer than the planet’s third-wealthiest person, French luxury tycoon&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/bernard-arnault/?list=rtb/">Bernard Arnault</a>, but still $11 billion behind the world’s number one, Amazon&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/amazon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AMZN</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/amazon">+1.8%</a>&nbsp;CEO&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/?list=rtb/">Jeff Bezos</a>.&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;estimates that Bezos has a net worth of $186.8 billion.



Musk’s net worth has grown at an astronomical clip over the past year. He has added nearly $150 billion to his fortune since March 2020, when he was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/">worth $24.6 billion</a>. Much of that increase comes from Tesla’s skyrocketing share price, which rose more than 720% in 2020. It has gained another 10% so far over the first week of 2021.&nbsp;



As Tesla’s stock soared ahead of its inclusion in the S&amp;P 500 Index on December 21, Musk surpassed Facebook&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/facebook" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FB</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/facebook">+1.9%</a>&nbsp;CEO&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/?list=rtb/">Mark Zuckerberg</a>&nbsp;(who is worth $98.2 billion today) to become the world’s fourth-richest person in early November, then leapfrogged Microsoft&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/microsoft" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">MSFT</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/microsoft">+3%</a>&nbsp;cofounder&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/?list=rtb/">Bill Gates</a>&nbsp;(worth $121.9 billion today) for the number three spot.



Musk owns around 21% of Tesla’s shares, plus a stake in private rocket company SpaceX. Tesla stock still sits at record highs, now trading for over $800 per share. The company’s $765 billion market cap makes it by far the most valuable car company in the world.



-By Sergei Klebnikov, Forbes Staff

Billionaire Elon Musk Receives Axel Springer Award

No, Elon Musk Is Not The Richest Person In The World—Yet

After more than a decade of annual losses, Tesla&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/tesla" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TSLA</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/tesla">+0.2%</a>&nbsp;extended its profitability streak to five consecutive quarters, a company first, as increased sales of Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles and pollution credits boosted net income to $331 million, its highest to date.



The Palo Alto, California-based company led by billionaire entrepreneur&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/">Elon Musk</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://ir.tesla.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>&nbsp;earnings per share of 27 cents in the quarter, up from 16 cents a year ago. Revenue jumped 39% to $8.77 billion from $6.3 billion in 2019’s third quarter. As usual, sales of emissions credits to other automakers fattened the quarterly profits. Tesla reported $397 million of credit sales, essentially free money that goes a long way toward keeping the company in the black.&nbsp;



The upbeat results come after Tesla said this month that <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2020/10/02/teslas-electric-car-shipments-jump-44-as-production-rebounds-from-coronavirus-slump/">deliveries of its electric cars and crossovers jumped 44%</a> in the quarter to the highest in company history, aided by the new Shanghai plant. Even as the company works to ramp up that $2 billion facility, it’s also begun construction of a $4 billion Gigafactory in Berlin and a new U.S. Gigafactory that will be built near Austin, Texas, at a cost of about $1 billion. Even with added capacity in China, it’s unclear whether Tesla will hit Musk’s goal of selling 500,000 vehicles this year. 



“We have the capacity installed to produce and deliver 500,000 vehicles this year,” Tesla said in a letter to investors. “While achieving this goal has become more difficult, delivering half a million vehicles in 2020 remains our target. Achieving this target depends primarily on quarter over quarter increases in Model Y and Shanghai production, as well as further improvements in logistics and delivery efficiency at higher volume levels.”



The results were generally higher than analysts anticipated. Tesla shares rose about 3.3% in after-hours Nasdaq <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/nasdaq" target="_blank">NDAQ</a> <a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/nasdaq">+2.6%</a> trading to $436.75. The stock was little changed at the close, ahead of earnings, at $422.64. 



ird Bridge Group in New York. “Not super surprising&nbsp;given how much they beat on deliveries, which was revealed earlier this month.”



Tesla’s operating margin of 9.2% was slightly below expectations, likely reflecting a vehicle mix that has skewed toward the Model 3 and Model Y, the company’s lowest margin vehicles, and away from the pricier Model S and Model X, Shields said.



Sales of pollution credits, including California zero-emission vehicle and U.S. CAFE credits, have become a lucrative source of revenue for Tesla as they are generated for each electric vehicle it sells. The $397 million received in the third quarter brings its year-to-date credit sales total to $1.18 billion, double 2019’s full year total.



“The regulatory credits business was stronger than our expectations,” Tesla CFO Zachary Kirkhorn said in a conference all. “We are tracking to more than double this year compared to last.”



Fourth-quarter deliveries will be critical to watch “given that they have softened their language around the previously stated goal of 500 K for the year,” he said. To reach that target, Tesla will have to get just over 180,000 vehicles to customers in the final quarter of 2020.



The company had about $14.5 billion of cash at of the end of the quarter and said it “should have sufficient liquidity to fund our product roadmap, long-term capacity expansion plans and other expenses.”



“We are currently building Model Y capacity at Gigafactory Shanghai, Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas, and remain on track to start deliveries from each location in 2021,” the company said. “Tesla Semi deliveries will also begin in 2021. We continue to significantly invest in our product roadmap.”



Despite the pandemic, Musk’s wealth has surged this year because of his nearly 25% ownership stake in Tesla. Forbes estimates his net worth at <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/">$88.7 billion</a> as of Oct. 21.



-By Alan Ohnsman, Forbes Staff

Elon Musk visits construction site of the Tesla Giga Factory

Tesla Stays In The Black For A Fifth Quarter, Buoyed By Emissions Credit Sales

The newest superstar investor has leveraged a zealous belief in innovation into a $29 billion-in-assets firm and a $250 million net worth. Among her predictions: Elon Musk&#8217;s car company is vastly undervalued.



Tesla shares were limping along around $200 in May 2019, about where they had traded five years earlier, when Elon Musk’s biggest Wall Street booster tried a gutsy experiment. Cathie Wood and her Ark Investment Management were already well-known for their way-out-there predictions that Tesla would build a fleet of robo-taxis worth $1 trillion and that its shares would soar 20- or 30-fold by 2023. Now she stirred the pot again by publishing online Ark’s new bull’s-case valuation of $1.4 trillion, implying a share price above $6,000, complete with every Excel calculation and assumption behind those estimates. 



Criticism came fast and furious. Tesla short seller Jim Chanos, famed for uncovering Enron’s fraud, took Wood to task over Ark’s forecasts of Tesla’s gross margins. “[W]hat Ark has produced is a forward pricing for Tesla, not a valuation,’’ sniffed valuation expert Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University. The model, he noted, didn’t include a discounted cash-flow analysis and carried incomplete forecasts on the costs Tesla would incur to scale its vehicle production. That $1 trillion value Ark was placing on Tesla’s nonexistent robo-taxi fleet? “Strikes me as more fairy tale than valuation,’’ Damodaran opined.&nbsp;



Sixteen months later, Tesla shares—after a five-for-one August stock split—were trading at $400. In other words, they’d risen tenfold, driven up by speculation and excitement over Musk’s autonomous-driving and battery technologies and Tesla’s stronger-than-expected financial performance. Musk’s car company is now worth five times more than Ford and General Motors combined, and Wood has made a fortune. The nitpicking skeptics, she believes, have missed the big picture: As electric cars go increasingly mainstream, production efficiencies and advances in batteries and other technologies will cut what it costs to make them. And as sticker prices fall, demand will surge, including from businesses like ride-sharing companies. In September, Musk promised a $25,000 car within three years.&nbsp;



Meanwhile, Wood, 64, is perfectly happy to have a chorus of critics: “It almost makes me feel comfortable, to be honest, because it means if we’re right, then the rewards will be pretty enormous.”&nbsp;



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<h1 class="has-text-align-center wp-block-heading">Loaded on the Ark</h1>



Cathie Wood’s ETFs bet on big ideas and industry disruptors. Here are some of her top holdings.



<figure class="wp-block-table is-style-stripes"><table><tbody><tr><td>ETF</td><td>Stock</td><td>1-Year Gain</td><td>Bullish Case</td></tr><tr><td>ARKK (Innovation)</td><td>Invitae Corp.</td><td>109%</td><td>Genetic-testing innovators could cut health-care costs.</td></tr><tr><td>ARKW (Next-gen internet)</td><td>Roku</td><td>68%</td><td>Consumer operating system for streaming media. </td></tr><tr><td>ARKQ (Robotics) </td><td>Proto Labs </td><td>26%</td><td>3D printer lowering costs in industries like aerospace. </td></tr><tr><td>ARKG (Genomics)</td><td>CRISPR Therapeutics</td><td>81%</td><td>Gene editor developing treatments for cancer and diabetes. </td></tr><tr><td>ARKF(Fintech)</td><td>Square </td><td>185%</td><td>The payment processor is becoming a digital bank. </td></tr></tbody></table></figure>



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Wood’s comfort with going her own way has helped her turn Ark into one of the fastest-growing and top-performing investment firms in the world. Its flagship $8.6 billion Ark Innovation Fund is up a staggering 75% in 2020 and has returned an annual average of 36% over the past five years, nearly triple that of the S&amp;P 500.&nbsp;



While most star stock pickers treat their work like state secrets, Wood makes Ark’s research freely available online and posts real-time logs of her firm’s trades. Instead of hiring MBAs, she prefers to bring onboard young analysts with backgrounds in subjects like molecular biology or computer engineering, figuring they’re more likely to spot the next trend. Even the structure of Ark, an acronym for Active Research Knowledge, is original. Wood manages seven portfolios designed to capitalize on breakthroughs in robotics, energy storage, DNA sequencing and financial and blockchain technology, and makes them available to investors, particularly Millennials trading on Robinhood, as tax-efficient exchange-traded funds.&nbsp;



Its Tesla position and a pandemic that has accelerated adoption of the technologies embedded in the 35 to 55 companies in each Ark ETF have helped its assets nearly triple in 2020, to $29 billion. “Coronavirus has catapulted our innovative platforms into high gear because they solve problems,” Wood says. “Innovation solves problems.”&nbsp;



Forbes&nbsp;conservatively values Ark at $500 million, or about 2% of assets under management, roughly the same multiple as publicly traded T. Rowe Price commands. Wood’s 50%-plus ownership gives her a net worth of $250 million, good for the No. 80 spot on&nbsp;Forbes’&nbsp;sixth annual list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women.&nbsp;



It’s easy to dismiss Wood as the face of a stock-market bubble created by the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies. But she has survived her share of both bubbles and bear markets. While an economics student at the University of Southern California, she studied under supply-side guru Arthur Laffer and apprenticed from 1977 to 1980 at Los Angeles fund giant Capital Group, watching as interest rates approaching 20% crushed the economy and the market. After graduating in 1981, she joined Jennison Associates, now an equity investment arm of Prudential, as an economist in New York. There she made an early call that inflation and interest rates had peaked. That garnered eye rolls from her superiors, but Wood was right—and the experience inculcated in her an appreciation for the potentially big upside of going against consensus. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center is-style-large is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">As the pandemic took hold, Cathie Wood loaded up on tech stocks that she correctly predicted would lead the recovery—and bought herself a house in ritzy Hilton Head, South Carolina, from which to work.</blockquote>



Frustrated with her career path at Jennison and wanting to research individual companies, one Friday Wood up and quit. Her mentor at the firm persuaded her to return the following Monday and moved her into equity research. She covered nascent wireless telecom companies in the late 1980s and early ’90s, getting a ground-floor view of the huge economic and societal changes coming as cellphones grew ubiquitous. In 2001, she moved to New York–based AllianceBernstein as chief investment officer for thematic portfolios. But the 2008 financial crisis ushered in an era in which active managers underperformed the S&amp;P 500 and trillions flooded into low-cost index funds. Wood decided a fresh approach was needed. In 2012, she proposed putting actively managed portfolios of innovative companies inside an ETF structure. The idea got nowhere at AllianceBernstein.&nbsp;



Two years later, she launched Ark in New York. Success wasn’t immediate. In the firm’s first two years, its flagship fund placed in the bottom quartile of its peer group, according to Morningstar. By the end of 2016, Wood had attracted just $307 million in assets, and Ark’s 0.75% management fee wasn’t covering overhead. To keep going, she dug deep in her savings, sold minority stakes and struck partnerships with larger firms to build distribution. Japan’s Nikko Asset Management and the mutual fund firm American Beacon now own 39% of the company. Almost 10% is owned by the firm’s two dozen employees.



In 2017, Ark took off, buoyed by surging prices for stocks like Netflix, Salesforce, DNA sequencer Illumina, digital-payments processor Square and digital health provider Athenahealth. Assets rose tenfold, and Ark began to build its brand on the back of bold predictions, an active Twitter presence and the free research it put online. (It also attracted notice for a cryptocurrency fund available only to accredited investors; Wood started buying Bitcoin, which she calls an “insurance policy” against inflation, in 2015 at $250 a coin.) &nbsp;



Wood takes a top-down approach to building portfolios, first identifying disruptions by any means possible, including crowdsourcing—she even opens the firm’s Friday afternoon research meetings to outsiders, who can call in via Lifesize. Economics is central. Wood is most bullish on innovations if she believes their costs will decline over time, creating real demand. When scoring potential holdings, Ark looks at corporate culture and management execution on growth initiatives. Only at the end of the process does Wood value a company, refusing to buy anything she doesn’t expect will rise by 15% annually over five years, Ark’s minimum expected holding period. 



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The tumult of 2020 has been good for Ark. In March, when the pandemic emerged and stocks plunged, Wood correctly predicted fast-growing tech companies would lead the world (and financial markets) to recovery. She concentrated Ark portfolios in Tesla and other top picks including education-software company 2U and real estate platform Zillow. Then, in late summer, when Tesla soared, she trimmed her holdings and built a large position in the battered shares of Slack.



With all successful innovations, of course, come copycats. Gimmicky themed ETFs have proliferated in everything from pets to sports gambling to work-from-home. Fund giants Dimensional Fund Advisors, Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price have all recently launched their own slates of actively managed ETFs.&nbsp;



An optimist by nature, Wood nonetheless offers some unsettling predictions for the next five years. She expects a broad swath of large industries—banking, energy, transportation, health care—to be disrupted by technological change, with many workers displaced. The result, she believes, is that economic growth, inflation and broad market indexes will all fall persistently short of expectations, providing an opportunity for active managers to pick the innovative winners that will continue to drive market-cap gains.



“I think the benchmarks and the indexes are going to go through a terrible period. We’re already seeing it,” she says. “We believe they are being increasingly populated by value traps.”&nbsp;



Does she think the market is now in a bubble? Nope. Uncertainty over the pandemic and the election (Wood supports President Trump “unabashedly”) means money has been flowing out of stocks and into the safety of bonds, she notes. “The fact that people are fearful now that we’re back at the S&amp;P 500 trading at 25 times earnings tells me that we are not in a bubble at all.” 



-By Antoine Gara, Forbes Staff

Tag: Tesla Share

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