A little-known investor who has put more money into Tesla than the company’s CEO Elon Musk is now reaping the rewards with a position worth billions of dollars, according to Electrek, which first reported on KoGuan Leo last year when he became the third-largest individual shareholder in Tesla behind Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.
As Electrek reported at the time, very little was known about the investor and his wealth. A graduate of Columbia University and New York Law School, he founded Software House International (SHI), a large IT company. Since this is a private company, it is difficult to value it, but it must be very valuable because it enabled Kaiwon Liao to invest billions of dollars in Tesla.
Last year, Liao Kaiyuan reportedly owned 6.2 million shares of Tesla stock, equivalent to 18.6 million shares after the stock split last month. At the time, he said he continued to buy Tesla stock and planned to invest billions of dollars more.
But another interesting thing about Liao Kaiyuan is that he certainly has a lot more money invested in Tesla at the moment than Elon Musk, even though he owns fewer shares than Elon Musk. At this point, he believes he has invested more money than Elon Musk and Ellison combined.
He disclosed 22.6 million shares of stock, so he kept his promise to invest more in the company. These more than 4 million shares of Tesla likely cost him about $1 billion.
On top of that, Kaiser Liao disclosed buying about 104,200 shares of Tesla’s stock in the past week.
If you think he’s lying, Tesla’s head of investor relations actually confirmed his past Tesla positions. Now, as for his claim that he has more money invested in Tesla than Elon Musk, that is most likely accurate. While it’s hard to determine how much money Kaiwon Liao has invested in Tesla, it looks like it’s at least $2 billion.
As for Elon
Elon Musk, it is also difficult to confirm how much money he has invested in Tesla, as he was the first outside investor in the company before it went public. He reportedly invested $6.5 million in the first Series A round of financing.
He has participated in every other round of financing since then and is believed to have invested about $70 million of his own money in Tesla prior to the company’s IPO. During Tesla’s IPO, the company raised several secondary financing rounds, some of which Elon Musk participated in for about $100 million.
As a result, Elon Musk may have invested less than $200 million of his own money into Tesla, making it one of the best investments ever made, as his stake in the company is now worth nearly $200 billion.
As for Oracle founder Larry Ellison, he disclosed an investment worth about $1 billion when he became a member of Tesla’s board of directors. Arguably, he got that position at Tesla for an investment of less than $1 billion. It’s hard to say now how much Tesla stock Ellison owns because he is no longer a member of Tesla’s board of directors. Unless he recently went on an undisclosed Tesla buying spree, it’s safe to say he doesn’t have as much money invested in Tesla as Kaiwon Liao.
