Disruption was the rising trend of the 2010s and as a result, today’s big cap publicly listed companies on the world’s most prominent stock exchanges are relatively recently established internet and technology firms, whereas back in the 1980s and 1990s before the dot com boom, they were large motor manufacturers, construction companies, big pharmaceuticals and Japanese real estate investment companies.
The bricks-and-mortar gave way to the ether at the turn of this Millennium, and here we are, almost a quarter of a century in, and the world is a very different place to where it was when there was a 19 at the beginning of the year.
This shift away from physical products made by traditional industries toward internet-based tertiary services has created a massive opportunity for disruption, and shortened development cycles by a huge amount.
One of the world’s most famous disruptors is Elon Musk, who, himself a dot com boomer having founded PayPal in 1999, has been so influential over the past decade that he has changed the entire structure of some of the oldest and most established industries that exist, and in doing so, changed the behavior of people worldwide.
Not surprisingly, someone with this much influence and disrupting capability became the richest man in the world according to official statistics.
However, unlike old-school stalwarts like Warren Buffett who has to tread a careful path because he is responsible for people’s investments, Elon Musk does things his way and his way only. He even took Tesla into cryptocurrency investment, making it the first publicly listed company to become a cryptocurrency ‘whale’, without even so much as a peep from usually conservative shareholders.
Indeed Tesla, despite being a small, relatively new company, had 10 times the market capitalization of 120-year established global giant Ford Motor Company by 2021!
Unlike Ford Motor Company, however, Tesla is volatile and during 2022 its value dropped like a falling girder from a cliff.
Now, official data has been released to show that Elon Musk himself has lost the most personally held money ever recorded to the extent that the Guinness World Records official adjudicators have listed him this week as the person to have lost the most of a personal fortune in history.
Elon Musk has personally lost over $100 billion during 2022 due to the plummeting share price of Tesla.
According to an estimate by Forbes, Elon Musk’s personal fortune is still approximately $144 billion, but he is no longer the richest man in the world having sustained such a massive drop.
As per his usual ‘gung ho’ personality, Elon Musk appears unperturbed by this, and perhaps sees it as an opportunity.
After all he thrives on volatility and does not like stagnation!
Therefore this is a big stock worth watching.
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