New Delhi: American electric car maker Tesla has registered its Indian arm amid indications that the company is set to enter the country’s automobile market and among many who welcomed the EV maker to the country are the founders of the brokerage company Zerodha.
On Twitter, the Kamath brothers welcomed Tesla founder Elon Musk to India with a stock market twist attached to it.
CEO Nithin Kamath said while a Tesla car can be afforded only by a few in India its stock can be bought by a lot more people on NSE and BSE. He even ran a poll on Twitter on whether Indians want Tesla on the road or on the stock exchanges and an overwhelming 80% votes went for the latter option.
Meanwhile, CIO Nikhil Kamath shared a meme where a girl asks her beloved for $5,000 and he asks her to buy 50 Tesla shares priced at $900 and predicted to hit $1,000 with a stop loss of $850.
The Kamath brothers’ stock market point of view is justified looking at the meteoric 700% rise of the EV maker’s shares on American bourses in 2020.
Tesla has reported profit in five straight quarters, defying last year’s auto industry trends of slumping sales, quarterly losses and global supply chain disruptions.
Last week, the electric-automaker’s shares surged 7.9%, boosting Musk past Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world’s 500 wealthiest people. Musk is worth $194.8 billion, or $9.5 billion more than Bezos.
The jump in Tesla’s stock price further inflates a valuation light-years apart from other automakers on numerous metrics. Tesla produced just over half-a-million cars last year, a fraction of the output of Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co.
Its market value of $773.5 billion is bigger than that of Facebook Inc. Larry Ellison’s 2% stake in Tesla alone would be enough to place the Oracle Corp. founder among the world’s 175 richest people (including his Oracle shares he’s ranked 10th).
Musk’s rise is even more astonishing given his dust-ups and gaffes in recent years, typically exacerbated by his spontaneous tweets. In 2018 he agreed to pay a $20 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission and step down as chairman of Tesla after tweeting a notion to take the company private at $420 a share, with “funding secured” — something he never did.
On several occasions Musk has bemoaned being “cash poor.” The vast majority of his net worth is tied up in equity of his companies, including Tesla — which pays no dividends — and closely held SpaceX and the Boring Company, a tunneling venture. Yet he’s professed to have little interest in the material trappings of wealth.
He tweeted last year he intended to sell “almost all” his physical possessions and he told German publisher Axel Springer in a December interview that the main purpose of his wealth is to accelerate humanity’s evolution into a spacefaring civilization.
After reports of his new status were published Thursday, Musk tweeted “How strange,” then added “Well, back to work.”
Still, he’s gotten on board with at least one trend among the super-rich. He confirmed last month he’d personally relocated from California to Texas, a state that has gained new popularity among the wealthy for levying zero income tax.
According to a regulatory filing, the firm has registered Tesla India Motors and Energy Pvt Ltd with RoC Bangalore.
The company has been registered as an unlisted private entity with a paid up capital of ₹1 lakh.
Vaibhav Taneja, Venkatrangam Sreeram and David Jon Feinstein have been appointed as directors of Tesla India, as per the Registrar of Companies (RoC) filing.
