Tesla Stock Reaches an All-Time High resulting in Elon Musk Surpassing Warren Buffett\\\’s Net Worth

Tesla stock continues to hit record highs. Warren Buffett, in the meantime, donated almost $3 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock, making his riches shrink further.

Elon Musk\\\’s wealth has officially surpassed that of Warren Buffett as on Friday, as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, powered by Tesla\\\’s skyrocketing stock price and a hefty donation from the Oracle of Omaha.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla saw his riches surge more than $6 billion on Friday alone to $70.5 billion as the establishment\\\’s market value capped off a week of fresh highs. The stock is now up 259% in 2020 compared to the benchmark S&P 500 index\\\’s 1% gain.

Up from No. 12, Musk is now No. 7 on the list, while slips down to 10th place. Board member Larry Ellison, a major shareholder himself at Tesla, also gained ground and came in at No. 11.

Perhaps the world\\\’s most famous investor, Buffett saw his riches decline this week after donating $2.9 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway shares to charity. Since 2006, according to Bloomberg, he\\\’s donated more than $37 billion worth of shares.

Billionaire wealth is not that straightforward

Although Musk takes zero salary from Tesla, Buffett has famously taken $100,000 annually for decades. For both however, their riches are mainly tacked to the daily ups and downs of equities markets.

Musk, specifically, has made headlines for his enormously complicated pay structure that allows him to buy $1.8 billion tranches of highly discounted Tesla stock when the company hits specific performance targets, for example profitability goals and market-capitalization benchmarks. He hit the first of those very goals earlier in 2020.

He\\\’s also stated that Tesla stock is likely overvalued, but that hasn\\\’t discouraged investors from further pushing the price to make it the most valuable car company, despite producing only a minor fraction of what traditional automakers annually churn out.

\\\”It doesn\\\’t make a lot of sense in most cases if you\\\’ve basically organized a company,\\\” Musk expressed on Joe Rogan’s podcast in May. \\\”How does this wealth arise? If you organize people in a better way to produce products and services that are better than existed before, and you have some ownership in that company, then that essentially gives you the right to allocate more capital.\\\”

Here’s where Buffett comes into Musk’s theory.

\\\”There\\\’s a conflation of consumption and capital allocation,\\\” Musk stated. \\\”So when you take Buffett, for example and to be totally frank, I\\\’m not his biggest fan, he does a lot of capital allocation. He reads a lot of annual reports of companies, all the account, and it\\\’s pretty boring honestly. What he\\\’s trying to figure out is, \\\’Does Coke or Pepsi deserve more capital?\\\’\\\”

Consequently, these two billionaires could not be more diverse in communication, either.

\\\”He\\\’s a remarkable guy,\\\” Buffett, who has but only tweeted nine times, said about the Tesla CEO back in 2019 as Musk sparred with US securities regulators. \\\”I just don\\\’t see the necessity to communicate.”