Singapore-based Leo KoGuan is the third-largest individual shareholder in electric carmaker Tesla, behind billionaire Larry Ellison and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

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According to bank records, KoGuan owned 6.31 million shares of Tesla till September, Bloomberg reported. Apart from this, KoGuan also held 1.82 million options that give him the right to buy or sell Tesla shares between $450 and $550 apiece.

“I will rise and fall with Tesla,” the self-proclaimed fan of Musk had tweeted in September.

He also said that he believed in “Elon's great mission".

After that the value of his supposed holdings soared to $4 billion, then $5 billion and now to more than $7 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Who is Leo KoGuan?

KoGuan is a low-profile investor born to Chinese parents in Indonesia in 1955. He studied international affairs in Columbia University and law from New York Law School. KoGuan started SHI International, a software company in New Jersey, after buying assets of a bankrupt software supplier in 1989. SHI now has more than 20,000 clients, including Boeing and AT&T. He is popular in China for donating money to top universities. KoGuan lives in his $46-million penthouse in Singapore that he bought from British investor James Dyson.

His investment mojo

KoGuan calls himself a retail investor who started trading in stocks in 2019. He invested in companies like Baidu, Nio, and Nvidia, but later focused on the California-based electric carmaker. In 2019, the billionaire met Elon Musk at the SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. By early next year, KoGuan had bought 2.3 million shares, worth around $1.5 billion. However, he almost lost everything once the markets cratered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Without losing hope, KoGuan kept buying stock options, taking profits as prices soared and using them to buy actual shares, in a double down process.

His investment motto: Stick to Tesla, keep doubling down, and believe in Elon Musk.

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Fortunately, I win more of the time than I lose,” KoGuan told Bloomberg in a Zoom interview.

Financial advisors have warned that huge option bets like KoGuan’s can lead to volatile price swings and that it is always better to diversify investments into multiple options. But KoGuan is unbowed. He says he believes Tesla is on a one-way path to becoming the world’s biggest company. And with it, his fortunes will rise too.

Sources

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-29/tesla-s-tsla-hidden-billionaire-how-one-retail-investor-made-7-billion?srnd=premium

(Edited by : Thomas Abraham)

First Published:Oct 30, 2021 6:27 PM IST