Gary Zhou 
Tesla’s biggest bull is arguably Ron Baron, a billionaire investor who runs New York’s Baron Capital and Baron Funds. After a monumental investment in Tesla stock years ago, which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in gains, Baron is again putting his trust and money in the hands of CEO Elon Musk’s newest venture: Twitter.
Baron said in an interview on Tuesday with CNBC that he was promised to make “two to three times” his money when he invested another $100 million in Twitter after Musk took the company private following his acquisition in late 2022. His decision was influenced by several things: his portfolio’s past success based on Musk’s ventures, Musk’s marketing techniques, and a promise that basically showed the business was poorly run under previous management.
“I don’t want to talk more about Twitter, because I’m not the expert on it yet, but he explained when we made our investment that he saw that there was a lot of cost there, it was incredibly poorly run,” Baron said.
Now that Musk believes Twitter is financially more stable than ever before, based on a variety of newly-implemented changes since his tenure as CEO began. The changes have effectively turned Twitter from a money-shedding operation to “trending to breakeven.”
Baron never had any disbelief in Musk. “He’s the best-known man in the world, I guess.”
Baron has always supported Musk’s ventures, especially Tesla and SpaceX. His personal shares have always remained off limits, and he has not sold. However, his firm Baron Capital sold 1.8 million shares in March 2021, but only because “it became a very large percentage of some accounts.”
The thesis for investing his money with Twitter is relatively the same, and it has a lot to do with the fact that Musk’s name is perhaps the best marketing strategy money cannot buy.
Musk has never taken a traditional approach in terms of his marketing strategy. While car companies use millions upon millions of dollars of budgetary spending to promote their vehicles through television and internet advertisements, Musk’s Tesla has spent nothing on marketing. This is where Baron believes he holds a distinct advantage, as Musk’s name alone does the marketing for his companies.
“Everyone else spends $1,000 to market a car, he spends nothing, because everyone knows Twitter. He spends nothing because everyone knows who he is.”
