Following on "Going back in time and telling a Tesla bull the company is worth $1tn" (TSLA).
From Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance Singapore:
From a penthouse overlooking the pale blue Singapore Strait, a discreet billionaire made a startling claim: he’d quietly amassed one of the single biggest stakes in Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc.
“I believe in Elon’s great mission,” Leo KoGuan told the world via Twitter.
And with that one tweet in September, KoGuan — already a billionaire in his own right — began to dribble out details to believers and skeptics alike. More, the value of his supposed holdings soared and soared: to US$4 billion, US$5 billion — and, now, to more than US$7 billion.
Is it true? Could a single obscure investor, even one as wealthy as KoGuan, amass such a huge position in a company like Tesla with scarcely anyone noticing? Could he really have become Tesla’s third-largest individual shareholder, behind fellow billionaire Larry Ellison and none other than Elon Musk, the richest person in history?
Yes. Bank records provided to Bloomberg News by KoGuan and confirmed by people familiar with his investments show he owned 6.31 million Tesla shares as of late September. He also held 1.82 million options giving him the right to buy Tesla between US$450 to US$550 a share — contracts that are deeply in the money after the stock closed at US$1,114 on Friday in New York.
Speaking via Zoom from his living room 63 floors above Singapore’s harbor, KoGuan, 66, provided a glimpse into his astonishing investment. The view from his aerie — a world away from the New Jersey technology business he co-owns — stretches from Batam Island to the south to Malaysia to the north to Indonesia to the west.
Wearing a white T-shirt, KoGuan laid out a no-frills roadmap to his trading riches: stick to a single stock, in this case, Tesla; keep doubling down; and, most important, believe in Elon Musk.
“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,” KoGuan says. “Fortunately, I win more of the time than I lose.”
Stranger claims have been made — and proved to be true — in an age when unfathomable fortunes sometimes seem to appear out of thin air. Tesla’s relentless rise has minted countless “Teslanaires” and, some suspect, more than a few as-yet-hidden billionaires.
In today’s hamster-wheel race for riches, the big winners can also recall the big losers. Bill Hwang amassed one of the world’s great fortunes in virtual secrecy and lost it all in a matter of days with the market-rattling collapse this year of his family office, Archegos Capital Management. Like Hwang, KoGuan has been able to avoid the prying eyes of regulators and the investing public because he manages money only for himself and because his stake in Tesla — less than 1% — falls below the 5% threshold that requires public disclosure in the U.S.
KoGuan says he’s added to his Tesla stake since September, buying both shares and options. (In a Sept. 23 tweet, Tesla’s head of investor relations, Martin Viecha, confirmed KoGuan’s original claim; Viecha didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story).
When Tesla jumped 13% on Monday after Hertz Global Holdings Inc. said it would buy 100,000 Tesla cars, KoGuan told his followers that his daily gain was in the ten figures. And he says there’s more to come: “I’m all in. Any money I have I spend on Tesla.”
How did KoGuan get here? How big was his initial pot of money? In a half-hour conversation, he sketched in some answers in broad strokes but was light on details. Little has been written about him, although it has been known for years that he is a billionaire. In the U.S., he’s a founder of SHI International Corp., an enterprise software company in suburban Somerset, New Jersey, with US$11.1 billion of annual revenue. In China, he’s known for donating money to a handful of top universities. More recently, his name briefly fluttered to the surface when he bought his US$46 million penthouse in Singapore from James Dyson, the British inventor of the bagless vacuum....
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We happened to catch Dyson's sale of the penthouse when Mr. D. re-re-domiciled to back to the U.K.:
Dyson Sells Singapore Penthouse For $46 Million (USD)
Well, not really happened to; it is one of the choicest shacks in one of the choicest locations in the world.
From the introduction to October 2018's "Dyson chooses Singapore for first electric car plant":
I like Singapore although it is a bit authoritarian.
The people are bright, usually the highest average I.Q. in the world, sometimes #2 to Hong Kong.
In the case of Singapore the I.Q. thing is especially interesting as their average is higher than that of any of the genetic pools the city-state draws from: the Chinese, Malay and Indian.
As a Malaysian Chinese businessman I know has told me, "We should never have let Singapore get away."
Another back-and-forth with Hong Kong is income/wealth. HK has more billionaires but Singapore has a higher average income.
And then there are the Gurkhas. More after the jump....
