An Elon Musk superfan made the Forbes 400 record after snapping up Tesla inventory through the pandemic

• An Elon Musk superfan joined the Forbes 400 record for the primary time this yr.
• Leo KoGuan is Tesla’s third-largest shareholder and is now value $7.2 billion.
• KoGuan is amongst a bunch of traders who’ve made tens of millions off of Tesla’s hovering share value.

An Elon Musk superfan simply joined the Forbes 400 record after going all in on Tesla inventory. 

Leo KoGuan, founding father of IT agency SHI Worldwide, has joined Forbes’ annual record of the world’s wealthiest individuals for the primary time, clocking in at No. 112. With a internet value of $7.2 billion, KoGuan outpaces hedge fund billionaire George Soros and philanthropist Melinda French Gates. 

What makes KoGuan’s wealth so uncommon is how he amassed it: by snapping up Tesla inventory through the early days of the pandemic. 

In a 2021 interview with Bloomberg, KoGuan stated he started buying and selling shares in 2019, shopping for up shares of corporations like Baidu and Nvidia. However he started shedding cash and opted to promote all of his shares besides his stake in Tesla, whose inventory he stored shopping for — by early 2020, he’d amassed a $1.5 billion stake within the firm. Even after the markets tanked within the early weeks of the pandemic, KoGuan doubled down on Tesla, and it paid off. 

KoGuan now owns about 22.6 million shares of Tesla and 1.23 million choices, making him the corporate’s third-largest particular person shareholder behind Musk and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

KoGuan advised Forbes in 2021 that he is “Elon’s fanboy.”

Not a lot is thought about how KoGuan spends his wealth, however based on Bloomberg, he is spent years making donations to Chinese language universities. In late 2020, KoGuan reportedly paid about $46 million for a Singapore penthouse owned by vacuum-cleaner tycoon James Dyson. 

KoGuan is one among a number of particular person traders who’ve change into millionaires off the again of Tesla’s meteoric rise. Nicknamed “Teslanaires,” many of those diehard followers invested over a decade in the past, made their fortunes on the hovering inventory, and held their positions, even through the pandemic downturn or Musk’s headline-making antics.  

 At the beginning of 2020, Tesla’s inventory was buying and selling at about $30 a share. Now it trades for nearly 10 instances that a lot. Tesla had inventory splits in 2020 and in August of this yr.

KoGuan advised Bloomberg final yr that he is “all in” on the electric-car maker. “Any cash I’ve I spend on Tesla,” he stated.