Good morning! There are few individuals who are notable and market-moving enough to cover as much as Elon Musk. He’s been a human lightning rod at every stage of his career, though this has become more true with time.

And as far as shareholders are concerned, the billionaire’s political foray has been a boon.

Musk rising

When Tesla shareholders have a good day, so does Elon Musk. 

On Wednesday, shares of Tesla climbed 5.93% to break a record high that had been in place for three years.

The same day, Musk became the first individual ever to boast more than a $400 billion net worth on account of a massive sale of insider shares for SpaceX — one of Musk’s other billion-dollar companies. 

Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index now estimates Musk to have a roughly $439 billion net worth.

That’s nearly more than what Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are worth combined.

Whatever you think of Musk’s politics, his status as a relentless business mogul and creator of shareholder value cannot be disputed. That said, however, his politics and his ability to provide investors with outsized return have become increasingly hard to parse. 

In the months before the presidential election, Musk campaigned on behalf of the Trump team and donated to Republican efforts. 

Those political efforts have paid dividends for Musk’s shareholders and his own wallet. 

Since Donald Trump won on November 5, Musk’s wealth has ballooned by roughly $4 billion per day — an increase of about two-thirds in one month, as Morning Brew highlighted.

Indeed, Tesla stock is up 75% since the election. Over the last five weeks, Tesla has skyrocketed from $242 per share to $424, with investors betting on a pro-innovation, tech-friendly White House — and of course a pro-Musk president.

Tesla has added nearly half a trillion dollars in market cap in that stretch.

Meanwhile, President-elect Trump has tapped the Tesla chief to helm DOGE, a new government agency aimed at cutting bureaucratic bloat. 

Separate from Tesla and SpaceX, Musk’s new AI company, xAI, has an estimated valuation of $50 billion, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal. Boring Company, too, is valued close to $7 billion.

His various companies negated any losses from his initial purchase of Twitter and the latest move of a Delaware judge to strike down his 2018 Tesla pay package.

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Elsewhere:

📉Inflation did not cool. And yet stocks soared anyway, with Big Tech names including Amazon and Meta hitting record highs and the Nasdaq hitting 20,000 for the first time. November CPI rose 0.3% for the fourth month in a row. (Bloomberg)

🤖 Google launched new AI tech. On Wednesday, the search giant opened access to the newest version of its technology, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental. It can generate text, images, and audio from a single application. Paid users can access a feature called Deep Research, which provides detailed reports based on web searches. (WSJ)

Rapid-fire:

• Oil prices surged after the EU agreed to further sanctions that threaten Russian flows (Reuters)

• Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, a prominent market bull, sees the S&P 500 rising 16% early next year before a sharp sell-off in the second half (Business Insider)

• Adobe stock tumbled more than 8% in after-hours trading following weak guidance and earnings (Bloomberg)

• XRP issuer Ripple got a fresh green light after regulators approved the company’s stablecoin (Barron’s)

• The biggest supermarket merger ever is now dead as Albertsons terminated a proposed takeover by Kroger (Business Insider)

Traders see 29% odds Elon Musk’s wealth surpasses $500 billion before 2026, according to Kalshi, the biggest US prediction market:

Here’s how investors are copying politician stock trades:

They’re doing it by copying politician trade-based portfolios on the Dub app. On Dub, you copy the trades of people, rather than trading individual stocks. All deposits are SIPC-insured up to $250k, not investment advice, read disclosures here.

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Not investment advice. Full disclosures here.

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