Elon Musk’s fortune reportedly loses $27B as Tesla stock plunges

Tesla chief Elon Musk’s fortune reportedly shrank by $27 billion last week as the electric-car maker’s staggering stock rally was thrown into reverse.

Musk suffered the hefty paper loss between Monday and Friday as a selloff in big tech stocks drove Tesla’s share price down nearly 17 percent in four days, according to Bloomberg’s calculations.

The Silicon Valley giant’s stock has slid about 15 percent so far this year and ended last week at $597.95, marking its lowest level since early December. Tesla fell another 2.3 percent in early trading Monday before recently climbing about 2.7 percent to $614.17.

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Despite the recent plunge, Musk, 49, still ranks as the world’s second-richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a net worth of some $157 billion, of which $102 billion is in Tesla stock.

But Musk is now about $20 billion behind Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, from whom he had taken the No. 1 spot as recently as late February, Bloomberg said.

Musk’s wealth exploded last year as Tesla posted six straight profitable quarters, delivered nearly 500,000 cars and joined the benchmark S&P 500 stock index. The growth helped fuel a meteoric rise in the pioneering automaker’s share price.

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But Tesla shares have suffered sharp losses in recent weeks amid concerns about its staggering valuation and increased competition from startups like China’s Nio as well as larger rivals such as General Motors. The company is also grappling with a global computer chip shortage that has reportedly affected automakers around the world.

Tesla has also faced questions about its $1.5 billion investment in bitcoin, which Musk has called a “less dumb form of liquidity than cash” despite musing that the cryptocurrency’s price appeared too high.

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But Tesla is still the dominant player in an electric-vehicle industry that could account for 20 percent of the world’s auto sales by 2030, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives argued.

“Despite the white knuckles today we believe Tesla will hit a trillion-dollar market cap in 2021 given the bullish EV secular thesis set to play out over the coming years,” Ives said in a Monday research note.