Tesla Now Worth Over $1 Trillion

Only six companies in the world are worth at least $1 trillion. Tesla is now one of them. Following the announcement earlier this week of rental car companyHertz's $4.4 billion orderfor 100,000 units of theTesla Model 3, the EV automaker's shares rallied more than 12 percent. Shares closed that day at $1,025. Combined with an influential Morgan Stanley auto analyst raising his Tesla target share price to $1,200, the automaker has hit that $1 trillion mark.

It joins an exclusive club of companies that have already done so, including Apple, Google's parent company Alphabet, and Amazon. Tesla is the second-fastest company to ever reach this value following its founding over 12 years ago.

Only Facebook beat it to the punch when it was around 9 years old. Heck, it took Apple 37 years to do so. CEO and co-founder Elon Musk has a 23 percent stake in the company. He's now worth about $230 billion. Just to give everyone an idea of how much more valuable Tesla is compared to rivals, the world's second most valuable automaker,Toyota, has a market cap of around $280 million. All the more impressive is that Tesla produces far fewer vehicles annually than Toyota.

Last year, Tesla sold half a million cars globally. Toyota sold around 9.5 million vehicles. So far in 2021, Tesla has sold some 627,000 vehicles and counting.