Tesla snatches the 5th spot from Facebook on the list of Wall Street’s most valuable companies

Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) shares jumped to a record high on Thursday in heavy trading that pushed the electric car manufacturer’s market capitalisation above Facebook.

It’s the first time in history that Tesla is worth more than Facebook. The Palo Alto-based company now holds the fifth spot on the list of Wall Street’s most valuable companies, behind Alphabet Inc, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple.

Tesla’s stock jumps to a record high of £614.79 per share

Closing the regular session at £601.27 per share on Thursday, Tesla continued the rally and touched £614.79 per share in after-hours trading. The clean energy company now has a stock market value of £570 billion versus a slightly lower £564 billion for Facebook.

More than £28.74 billion of Tesla shares were traded on Thursday, representing a record for the company. Shares of the next three companies combined, Apple, Alibaba, and Amazon, that were traded the most were valued less than that of Tesla.

Analyst Joseph Spak of RBC commented on the historic event on Thursday and said that he misjudged Tesla’s ability to boost its capital via the soaring stock price. Spak said:

“We took a fresh look at the growth opportunity, what we got wrong about TSLA’s positioning and the valuation and conclude that the stock price itself is likely to be somewhat self-fulfilling to TSLA’s growth and strategy.”

RBC also raised its rating on Tesla from “underperform” to “sector perform”. Tesla is now the world’s most valuable automaker despite its production figures being significantly weaker than the competitors, including Volkswagen, General Motors, and Toyota.

Elon Musk tops Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person

A Bloomberg report also said on Thursday that CEO Elon Musk of Tesla became the richest person in the world surpassing Amazon’s Jeff Bezos yesterday. Musk now has a net worth of £136.32 billion compared to Bezos’ slightly lower £135.58 billion.

Tesla said last week that its annual vehicle deliveries topped analysts’ estimates in 2020. On average, experts forecast the U.S. carmaker to record £880 million of net profits in 2020. In comparison, GM is expected to print £4.27 billion of net profits while the estimate for Facebook’s annual profit stands at £19.97 billion.

Tesla performed massively upbeat in the stock market last year with an annual gain of more than 700%. At the time of writing, the American electric vehicle and clean energy company has a price to earnings ratio of 1,616.82.