Musk now worth more than ExxonMobil after $36.2 bn single-day gain

It’s just one more arresting data point amid a flurry of superlatives, but Elon Musk’s soaring net worth now makes him more valuable than Exxon Mobil. 

The wealth of the world’s richest person jumped to $288.6 billion Monday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The $36.2 billion gain followed a surge in Tesla Inc.’s stock price after Hertz Global Holdings Inc ordered 100,000 cars.

Eclipsing the value of an old-economy bellwether like Exxon may seem like an inevitable milestone in Musk’s trajectory. But the oil company’s own share price has been no laggard this year. Despite being overtaken by Musk at the start of 2021, Exxon has been on a tear since then. 

It outpaced the Tesla chief executive this year as oil and natural gas prices advanced. Still, that fossil-fuel rally, should it continue, may help spur even more sales of EVs.

$1 trillion valuation belies revenue position

Tesla has joined the trillion-dollar-valuation club as the member with the lowest revenue. Tesla shares surged as much as 14.9 per cent to $1,045.02, making it the world's most valuable automaker according to Reuters calculations based on its latest filing.

Even Musk expressed surprise at the velocity of the surge. “Strange that moved valuation, as Tesla is very much a production ramp problem, not a demand problem,” Musk tweeted in reply to a comment by Ross Gerber, co-founder of the investment fund Gerber Kawasaki and a Tesla shareholder. "Wild $T1mes!" Musk wrote in a separate tweet.

Tesla is the first carmaker to join the elite club of trillion-dollar companies that includes Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc. The EV maker’s shares have run past several milestones over the past couple weeks amid a rush of positive news, including reaching a rarefied $1 trillion in market value on Monday.  That helped further bolster sentiment among investors, who are betting on Tesla’s potential for rapid future growth as EVs become mainstream and eventually replace gas-driven cars.  However, unlike its trillion-dollar peers, Tesla’s valuation touched that level before its revenue could reach the $50-billion mark. 

Even though Tesla is the fifth-biggest company on the S&P 500 Index when ranked by market capitalisation, it is in the 89th place when ranked by last year’s annual revenue. It is preceded by Capital One Financial Corp — which had $31.6 billion in revenue last year versus Tesla’s $31.5 billion and is valued at $75 billion. The company with the biggest revenue on the index is Walmart — a mammoth $559.2 billion that dwarfs its own valuation of about $417 billion.