Elon Musk’s Tesla Now Worth More Than $1trillion

• Tesla is the second-fastest company to hit the $1 trillion mark…
• Last year Tesla sold only 500,000 cars worldwide

Ekohotblog reports that Elon Musk’s Tesla has now become the sixth business in US history to reach $1 trillion in market capitalization.

The stock rose more than 12% to $1,045 on Monday, driven by two pieces of excellent news: Hertz just placed a record order of 100,000 Teslas for its fleet, and Morgan Stanley auto analyst Adam Jonas recently increased his price forecast on Tesla to $1,200 per share.

Tesla now has a market capitalization of over $1 trillion, thanks to the massive one-day rise. That market value is less than half that of Apple, the world’s most valuable corporation at $2.5 trillion, and Microsoft, the second most valuable company at $2.3 trillion.

Other members of the trillion-dollar club include Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which is worth $1.8 trillion, and Amazon, which is worth $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 (FB) shares were down more than 5% in late Friday trading, and off 18% from the peak earlier this year when the company was valued at well more than $1 trillion. Facebook’s market cap has since fallen to $916 billion.

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.