(Bloomberg) — 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?