Tesla owner Elon Musk is one of the most influential leaders in the business world (see pp. 6–8). The news that the car rental company Hertz ordered 100,000 Tesla vehicles for its global fleet helped push the market capitalisation of Tesla over $1 trillion for the first time. What was also significant with this order is that Hertz did not receive a discount and paid full price for each vehicle. This is almost unheard of: major car rental agreements usually benefit from economies of scale. Hertz paid the full price of $4.2 billion for the order and this put an additional $100 billion on the value of Tesla. For context, the additional value is more than the market value of both General Motors and Ford.
This latest valuation of the company catapulted Musk to the top of the list of the world’s richest people, going past Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg along the way. Musk’s net worth moved close to $300 billion on the latest valuation, and the market capitalisation of Tesla is now higher than the combined market capitalisation of its five largest rivals combined.
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