The fact that there are companies that are considered more speculative investments on the stock exchange and are still worth something is not entirely unusual. But a trillion dollars? “If you were wondering,” writes the news agency Bloomberg“Which company with a junk rating” would be the first to crack the one trillion dollar threshold on the stock market, then “the wait is over”. The answer is: Tesla.
The electric carmaker’s shares rose more than twelve percent on Monday and were worth $ 1,000 apiece for the first time. The consequences – more than symbolic: a market capitalization of one trillion dollars is more than the Internet platform Facebook. With numbers of this magnitude, it is definitely worth converting: This is around 860 billion euros.
This makes Tesla the fifth largest publicly traded company in the United States. A car manufacturer who launched its roadster, the first fully electric series vehicle with lithium-ion batteries, on the market from 2008 onwards. A classic car manufacturer like Ford, just for comparison, was founded 105 years before that roadster in Detroit and is now worth almost 64 billion dollars on the stock exchange. That shows how things are shifting right now.
How does such a jump in price come about? The reason is a large order from the car rental company Hertz, which announced that it would buy 100,000 cars from Tesla by the end of next year. The cars are to be used at Hertz in both the US and European cities. “Electric vehicles are now mainstream,” said Hertz CEO Mark Fields. The car rental company’s plan is ambitious. He wants to build “the largest electric vehicle fleet in North America and one of the largest in the world”. Although the rental companies have had electric cars in their range since 2011, the goal is now to equip around a fifth of their own rental car fleet with electric vehicles, and the Tesla Model 3 should be on offer as early as November. And, because it would hardly be of interest to customers without it: Hertz wants to set up thousands of charging stations at its rental locations.
The topic drives everyone. Sixt recently announced that they wanted to invest over 50 million euros in expanding the charging infrastructure. Reason: As with gasoline cars shortly before returning the car, drive past the gas station and fill it up, this is no longer easy with e-cars. Especially not if you have to wait over an hour for the battery to be fully charged.
At the beginning of the year, Tesla was valued at around $ 700 billion on the stock exchange, at the beginning of 2020 at $ 100 billion. This was not without consequences for the financial position of the Tesla boss. According to Forbes Elon Musk is currently the richest person in the world with a fortune of $ 255 billion, ahead of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. However, Musk is not just a Tesla boss. His empire also includes a number of other companies, including the space company Space X. It is quite possible that Musk will earn quite a lot more in the near future thanks to his space activities.