Larry Ellison’s first year on the Tesla board has been very, very profitable.
Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle Corporation and one of the world’s richest men, joined the Tesla board on Dec. 27, 2018. Before he did, though, he purchased 3 million shares of electric carmaker’s stock, the company said late last year.
The closing value of those shares the day he joined the board was about $948 million, a stake representing 1.7% of Tesla shares. That makes him the second largest shareholder on the board after CEO Elon Musk.
For the first six months, Ellison’s investment looked like a bad bet. Tesla shares tumbled 43% before hitting a 52-week low of $179.61 a share on June 3.
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But since then the stock has been on a tear. On Monday Tesla stock crossed $500 a share for the first time in the company’s history, and it kept climbing Tuesday as a variety of stock analysts raised their target price for shares. Even with a slight decline in shares on Wednesday, the stock price has nearly tripled in value since the June low and is up 68% since the day Ellison joined the board.
That translates into a paper profit of $1.6 billion on Ellison’s Tesla holdings since he joined the board.
By comparison, shares of software company Oracle, where he is its chairman and largest shareholder, are up just around 20% over the same period. But since he owns so many more shares of Oracle stock — 1.2 billion shares, or 35% of the company – the more modest rise in Oracle shares netted him a larger paper gain of $11.5 billion during that time.
Ellison’s overall net worth is estimated at about $68 billion, according to the real time billionaire tracker at Forbes. That makes him the seventh richest man in the world.
