by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
To mark this moment in the history of insane stock prices where a tiny automaker with a global market share of 0.5% and a big loss in 2019 became the most valuable automaker in the world.
Shares of Tesla jumped 3.9% this morning to $1,130, which gave the automaker a market value of $210 billion. It thereby finally surpassed Toyota, the formerly #1 most valuable automaker in the world, whose shares declined 1.6% in Tokyo at the close today, giving it a market cap of ¥21,719 trillion – or $202 billion at today’s exchange rate.
That Tesla – a tiny automaker with a global market share of 0.5% (half a percent) that lost $862 million in 2019, when most automakers made money because those were the Good Times – has become a supernatural phenomenon led by a guy who is regularly seen walking on water, is proven beyond reasonable doubt by the double-WTF round-trip chart of the year (stock prices via YCharts):