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 (TSLA) shares tumbled 43% before hitting a 52-week low of $179.61 a share on June 3.
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 (ORCL), 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 (ORCL) stock – 1.2 billion shares, or 35% of the company - the more modest rise in Oracle (ORCL) 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.
