On Monday, Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla was chosen to join the S&P 500, and in after-hour trading its stocks closed at $408.09 at 6 p.m. That enabled Musk’s net worth to zoom to $117.5 billion, according to Bloomberg, putting Musk on the verge of leapfrogging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and becoming the third richest person in the world, only trailing Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
Tesla will officially join the S&P 500 on December 21; it will be the largest company ever added to the index, CNBC reported.
“Due to the large size of the addition, S&P Dow Jones Indices is seeking feedback through a consultation to the investment community to determine if Tesla should be added all at once on the rebalance effective date or in two separate tranches ending on the rebalance effective date,” S&P stated, as the Daily Mail noted. “Tesla is now valued at more than Disney, Toyota and Coca-Cola and has a market cap of nearly $387 billion.”
“To be eligible to join the S&P 500, a company must be based in the United States, have a market capitalization of at least $8.2 billion, be highly liquid, and have at least 50% of its shares available to the public,” CNN explained. “Its most recent quarter’s earnings and the sum of its trailing four consecutive quarters’ earnings must be positive, as well.”
On Sunday, Musk’s SpaceX launched four astronauts aboard a privately built craft to reach the International Space Station from U.S. soil. As The Daily Wire reported, “Earlier this month, NASA certified the SpaceX human spaceflight system, the first time the American space agency has ever done so for a commercial system. ‘I could not be more proud of everyone at SpaceX and all of our suppliers who worked incredibly hard to develop, test, and fly the first commercial human spaceflight system in history to be certified by NASA,’ said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.”
Last May, Musk gave an indication of how fed-up he was with the leftist governance of his home state of California, apparently urging followers on Twitter to push back against progressivism, tweeting succinctly, “Take the red pill.”
Take the red pill 🌹
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2020
Prior to that, in late April, Musk urged governors across the nation to start opening their states for business, tweeting, “FREE AMERICA NOW,” “Give people their freedom back,” and responded to an article in the Texas Tribune titled, “Texas restaurants, retailers and other businesses can reopen Friday,” by tweeting “Bravo Texas!”
Days later, speaking on a Tesla earnings call, Musk ramped up his rhetoric about shelter-in-place orders around the nation, calling them “fascist.” According to The Verge, Musk stated:
We are a bit worried about not being able to resume production in the Bay Area, and that should be identified as a serious risk. The expansion of shelter-in-place, or as we call it, forcibly imprisoning people in their homes, against all their constitutional rights, is, in my opinion, breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong, and not why people came to America and built this country. What the f***!