Musk’s disciples are counting on his abilities as an innovator being outstanding enough to see his other business ventures like SpaceX and xAI Holdings (which owns X, formerly known as Twitter) exponentially explode in value.
Since 2015, the Tesla share price has increased more than 3000 per cent. Most of this gain came from the wellspring of Musk commercialising the electric vehicles.
Elon Musk revels in the chainsaw gift he received from Argentina’s President Javier Milei on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the US earlier this year.Credit: AP
But China has put paid to any dreams of Tesla’s world domination of EVs. The country now boasts 129 EV makers and has recently very successfully colonised many markets, including Australia with brands like BYD.
Meanwhile, Tesla has struggled to maintain EV sales growth in many markets, with Musk’s pro-Trump antics hurting sales.
Even Musk’s supporters don’t expect a repeat of the kind of share price performance Tesla has experienced over the past decade. That said, a recent remuneration proposal from Tesla’s board has promised to award him $US1 trillion if he surmounts a series of hurdles over 10 years including increasing the market capitalisation of Tesla from its current level of $US1.4 trillion to $US8.5 trillion.
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That’s some incentive, and just the sheer numbers of zeros highlight a growing chasm in the way we as a society understand wealth. The numbers in the rich lists are increasingly detached from any measure of purchasing power. In Musk’s case there are is literally no goods and services that he can’t buy.
So, if the numbers are just a metric for success, then those at the very top of the wealth tree are more successful than any generation before. And this explosion in net worth is now largely tied to investments in the AI revolution.
Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle, recently boosted his fortune by more than $US100 billion in a single day. Oracle’s share price skyrocketed 36 per cent on the back of a statement that revenue from its cloud infrastructure business will soar by 700 per cent to $US144 billion over the next four years – all thanks to the power of AI.
Most of the others occupying the top 10 positions on the latest Forbes list are in the tech sphere.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg comes in at number three with $US251 billion, ahead of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos at $US232 billion. Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin are next in line and followed by Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang.
A lot of these guys are not household names, but all have more wealth than many of the world’s economies. But Musk’s wealth is next level, and as far as tech oligarchs go, he is in a league of his own.
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