- The billionaire investor
Chamath Palihapitiya told CNBC on Thursday that Tesla's stock could be worth three times its current valuation, which would make CEOElon Musk the first trillionaire. - On Thursday, Tesla shares shot up 6.9%, and Musk $4.
- Palihapitiya said that Tesla was a "distributed energy business" and that he'd believed for a while that the world's first trillionaire would be a person fighting climate change.
- "Delivering clean energy, allowing the world to be sustainable, is an incredibly important thing that will be rewarded by
markets and individuals," Palihapitiya said. - "Don't sell a share" of Tesla, he told investors.
- $4.
The billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya said $4 stock could be worth three times its current valuation, which would make CEO Elon Musk the first trillionaire.
"Don't sell a share" of Tesla, Palihapitiya told investors $4. He advised investors to get behind Musk and other entrepreneurs who wouldn't bend to short-term profits and who were striving to make the world a better place.
"I don't understand why people are so focused on selling things that work," the Social Capital CEO added. "When things are working, you're paid to stay with people that know what they're doing. And this is a guy who has consistently been one of the most important entrepreneurs in the world. And so why bet against him?"
Musk $4 on Thursday. Tesla shares shot up as much as 6.9%, to $808.69, boosting the net worth of its CEO to about $186 billion.
Musk's wealth derives from his stakes of roughly 20% in Tesla and 48% in SpaceX, as well as 57 million exercisable Tesla stock options, Bloomberg said.
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Palihapitiya said that Tesla was a "distributed energy business" and that Musk was figuring out a way to harness energy, store it, and use it to help people to be productive and fight climate change.
"I tweeted this a while ago that I thought the world's first trillionaire would be a person fighting climate change," Palihapitiya said. "It very well could be Elon. But if it's not him, it'll be somebody like him. It will be because of this: Delivering clean energy, allowing the world to be sustainable, is an incredibly important thing that will be rewarded by markets and individuals."
Palihapitiya added that that the power-utility business was ripe for disruption and that there were "trillions of dollars of bonds, of capex, of value sitting inside the energy-generation infrastructure." When those are harnessed, Tesla will double and triple again, he said.
Palihapitiya's CNBC appearance aired shortly after $4 to "sector perform" from "underperform" and increased its price target to $700 from $339.
"There is no graceful way to put this other than to say we got TSLA's stock completely wrong," RBC said in a note on Thursday.
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