Skip to main content

Elon Musk is now officially richer than Warren Buffett after Tesla's stock hits an all-time high (TSLA, BRKA)

* Elon Musk is officially more wealthy than Warren Buffett. * Tesla stock, of which Musk is the largest holder, skyrocketed to record highs this week. * Buffett, meanwhile, donated almost $3 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock, causing his riches to shrink.  * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Elon Musk's wealth officially surpassed that of Warren Buffett on Friday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, fueled by Tesla's skyrocketing stock price and a hefty donation by the Oracle of Omaha. Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the electric-car maker's biggest shareholder, saw his riches surge more than $6 billion on Friday alone to $70.5 billion as the company's market value capped off a week of fresh highs. The stock is up 259% in 2020 compared with the benchmark S&P 500 index's 1% gain. Musk is now No. 7 on the list, up from No. 12. Buffett, the most famous investor and a multibillionaire, saw his fortune decline this week after giving away $2.9 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway shares to charity. Since 2006, Bloomberg reported, he's gifted more than $37 billion worth of shares. Billionaire wealth is anything but straightforward Musk takes zero salary from Tesla, while Buffett has famously taken $100,000 annually for decades. For both men, their riches are largely tacked to the daily ups and downs of equities markets. Musk, in particular, has made headlines for his massive — and massively complicated — pay structure that allows him to buy $1.8 billion tranches of highly discounted Tesla stock as the company hits specific performance targets, like profitability goals and market-capitalization benchmarks. He hit the first of those goals earlier this year.  He's also said Tesla stock is likely overvalued, but that hasn't stopped investors from pushing the price high enough to make it the most valuable car company, despite producing only a small fraction of what traditional automakers churn out. Then there's the question of what to do with such wealth. "It doesn't make a lot of sense in most cases if you've basically organized a company," Musk told Joe Rogan on his podcast in May. "How does this wealth arise? If you organize people in a better way to produce products and services that are better than existed before, and you have some ownership in that company, then that essentially gives you the right to allocate more capital." That's where Buffett comes into his theory. "There's a conflation of consumption and capital allocation," Musk said. "So when you take Warren Buffett, for example — and to be totally frank, I'm not his biggest fan — he does a lot of capital allocation. He reads a lot of annual reports of companies, all the account, and it's pretty boring honestly. What he's trying to figure out is, 'Does Coke or Pepsi deserve more capital?'" The two billionaires couldn't be more different in communication, either. "He's a remarkable guy," Buffett, who has tweeted only nine times, said of Musk in 2019 as the Tesla CEO sparred with US securities regulators. "I just don't see the necessity to communicate." SEE ALSO: Elon Musk has officially hit the first milestone of his $55 billion compensation package Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: How waste is dealt with on the world's largest cruise ship
https://bit.ly/3fkrI5T

Popular posts from this blog

Bill Gates says the world would need as many as 14 billion doses of a coronavirus vaccine to stop the virus

* The world could need as many as 14 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines, Bill Gates said on Thursday in a blog post about the race to develop a way to make people immune to the disease. * "We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this to happen as quickly as possible," Gates said. * Gates said he had his eyes on eight to 10 promising candidates, adding that healthcare workers and people in low-income countries should be first in line once we find one that works. * While potential vaccines are progressing with historic speed, they're still months, or even years away, and the biggest challenge lies ahead in proving whether they are safe and effective in humans. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Bill Gates believes we may eventually need to produce as many as 14 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines globally and that we're anywhere from nine months to two years away from making tha...
Read more

The 11 most important details we already know about the PlayStation 5, Sony's next-generation video game console set to arrive this year

* The PlayStation 5, Sony's next-generation game console that's deep in production, is scheduled to launch during the 2020 holiday season. * As you might expect, the PlayStation 5 is promised to be more powerful than the existing PlayStation 4 — and we've slowly been learning more about the next-gen console's new features since it was first revealed. * So far, Sony has offered a first glimpse at the new console via its new DualSense gamepad, and a tech demo highlighted the technical prowess of the new machine. * Here's everything we know so far about Sony's next-generation PlayStation console. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. The PlayStation 5 is almost here. Sony's next-generation PlayStation game console is scheduled to arrive this holiday season, but we already know plenty of details about it right now: how powerful it is, its main features, and we've even gotten a good look at its new gamepad.  Here everything we kno...
Read more

Tokyo installed see-through public toilets in a park to let people inspect their cleanliness before using them, at which point the glass turns opaque

* Two see-through bathrooms have been installed in public parks in Tokyo. * They are made from "smart glass" designed so people can see how clean they are inside before using them. The glass turns opaque when the bathroom is locked and in use. * The stalls are part of a project that is redoing 17 of the city's public bathrooms with different designers to make them more accessible and appealing. * The goal is to fight assumptions that public toilets are "are dark, dirty, smelly, and scary," said the nonprofit foundation behind the project. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Tokyo has installed two see-through bathroom facilities in public parks, allowing people to see how clean they are before deciding to use them, at which point they turn opaque. The bathrooms are made of colored "smart glass," which turns opaque when the stalls are locked, said Shigeru Ban, the architect behind the designs. You can see how it works her...
Read more