Gary Zhou 
For Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), the first day of 2021 proved very impressive, with the value of the electric car manufacturer passing the $700 billion mark during Monday’s intraday. CEO Elon Musk has now narrowed the distance between his net worth and that of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, currently the world’s wealthiest individual, given that Tesla shares finished the day at $729.7 per share with a market cap of $691 billion.
Elon Musk’s net wealth is currently estimated at $175 billion in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, just $11 billion shy of the $186 billion net worth of Jeff Bezos. Tesla is associated with a large amount of Musk’s net worth, which means that if the electric car manufacturer maintains its momentum, it may only be a matter of time before Elon meets or maybe even exceeds the net worth of the Amazon founder.
It wasn’t just Elon Musk’s net worth that crossed a landmark. Tesla shares have hit as high as $744.49 per share, giving the company a market cap for the first time of over $700 billion. Dow Jones Stock Data reveals just how fast the market cap of Tesla has grown. It took 111 trading days for the electric car maker to go from $100 billion to $200 billion, for instance, but it only took 13 trading days for TSLA to go from $200 billion to $300 billion.
TSLA’s Dow Jones Market Data is based on a simple share count of approximately 950 million shares. As noted by Barron’s, however, in its Q3 2020 update, Tesla posted around 1.1 billion completely diluted shares outstanding. Factors such as management stock options, limited share units, and stock warrants are the reason for this disparity between basic and diluted shares. With the 1.1 billion outstanding stock, on Monday, Tesla actually reached around $820 billion in market value.
In contrast, the basic and diluted share counts of Facebook, at least based on the Q3 financial report of the social media giant, are listed at 2.85 billion and 2.89 billion shares, respectively. This means that Facebook is worth around $780 billion today, on a completely diluted basis. With its 1.1 billion shares outstanding, that’s smaller than Tesla’s market cap. It should also be noted that the gap between the basic and diluted shares of Tesla is very high, owing in no small part to Elon Musk, who earns most of his compensation through stock directly linked to the success of Tesla.
Tesla stock is trading at $738.90 per share at the time of the post.
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