Elon Musk Got $10 Billion Richer This Week Amid Electric Vehicle-Friendly Infrastructure...

THE CHANGING FORTUNES OF THE WORLD’S RICHEST

he stock market recovered from a brief mid-June dip to rise to new record highs this week as the White House reached a deal with a bipartisan group of senators on an infrastructure bill. Tesla’s Elon Musk was the rally’s biggest beneficiary.

Musk, the world’s third richest person, saw his fortune grow by $9.9 billion, finishing the week at $165.9 billion. Tesla stock rose by 9% on Wednesday and Thursday and was up 7.8% for the week. Tesla handily outpaced the main stock indices: The S&P 500 index gained 2.7% this week, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 3.4%.

The Biden administration’s proposed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, announced Thursday, includes $15 billion in spending for a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations and electrifying school buses and transit buses in the U.S., according to a White House fact sheet. The proposal does not include rebates for electric car buyers, which were part of the ambitious spending plan Biden rolled out in March, but the compromise still helped lift the stocks of Tesla and other fledgling EV companies like Fisker and Lordstown Motors.

Tesla’s second-quarter delivery numbers, set to be released in the first week of July, will shed more light on the company’s growth. Its 185,000 deliveries in the first quarter were more than double what it reported in 2020. Despite this week’s surge, Tesla stock is still 24% below its January records—which briefly made Musk the world’s richest person. At a current No. 3, Musk trails Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault.

The second-biggest winner of the week was Nike founder Phil Knight, whose fortune grew by $6.4 billion in one day on Friday. On Thursday afternoon Nike reported blockbuster earnings for its quarter and fiscal year ending May 31, 2021. Its revenue of $12.3 billion for the quarter nearly doubled last year’s number from the early days of the pandemic, and the stock soared 15.5% to a record high on Friday. Knight, who retired from Nike’s board in 2016, now has a net worth of $56.4 billion, per Forbes estimates.