Tesla just became the sixth company in U.S. history to be worth US$1 trillion.
Shares popped more than 12% Monday to close at about $1,025, boosted by two spots of good news: Hertz announced a record order of 100,000 Teslas for its fleet, and influential Morgan Stanley auto analyst Adam Jonas recently raised his price target on Tesla to $1,200 a share.
That hefty one-day gain put Tesla just over the $1-trillion mark. That market capitalization is less than half that of Apple, the most valuable company in the world at $2.5 trillion, and No. 2 Microsoft, which is worth $2.3 trillion. Other members of the trillion-dollar club include Google parent Alphabet, worth $1.8 trillion, and Amazon, at $1.7 trillion.
Tesla is the second fastest company to hit the $1 trillion mark, reaching it just more than 12 years after its 2010 initial public offering. Only Facebook, which needed just over 9 years from its IPO to reach $1 trillion, got there faster.
Apple took the longest, hitting the mark more than 37 years after it started trading in 1980, followed by Microsoft, which took a bit more than 33 years. Amazon needed 21 years, while Google reached the mark for the first time after 15 years. It's not uncommon for companies that reach the $1 trillion benchmark to slip back below it.
Tesla did on Monday surpass Facebook, whose shares are slipping following the release of a large trove of internal documents known as "The Facebook Papers."
Facebook shares closed down more than 5% in Friday trading, and even with a modest rebound Monday are off 17% from the peak earlier this year when the company was valued at more than $1 trillion. Facebook's market cap closed Monday at $927 billion.
For Tesla, by contrast, Wall Street's excitement about the future of electric vehicles has pushed the company's market value to more than the 11 largest global automakers combined.
Tesla is worth more than three times as much as Toyota, the second most valuable automaker, which has a market cap of about $280 billion, and boasts sales and profits that dwarf those of Tesla.
Last year, Tesla sold only 500,000 cars worldwide — meaning its current market value is equivalent to roughly $2 million per vehicle sold.
The company has already sold 627,000 cars so far this year, and is aiming to be close to a million sales for the full year. That would still equate to a valuation of more than $1 million per vehicle, but clearly investors are nonetheless betting Tesla will achieve its target of 50% or more in annual sales growth for years to come.
