The global stock market had a horrible day. Even Wall Street darlings like Google and Apple saw billions of dollars trimmed off their market capitalizations. A surprising exception, SolarCity, the largest residential solar installer in the US, managed to go against the grain and closed the day with an impressive 7% gain thanks to its Chairman and major shareholder Elon Musk who bought another $5 million worth of shares during the stock’s price fall to add to his holding in the company now worth over $900 million of SolarCity’s total market cap of just over $4 billion.
Like most stocks today, SolarCity’s opened significantly down, but unlike most of the market, it managed to not only gained back its losses, but surpassed the whole market and finished surprisingly strong:
Musk started buying right when the market opened and managed to get shares between $34.82 and $45.35, averaging at $40.49. He bought a total of 123,510 shares to bring his holdings to 20,805,082 shares.
The move comes less than a week after Musk bought $20 million worth of Tesla stocks in the company’s recent secondary offering. In SolarCity’s case, Musk bought the shares in the open market.
Interestingly enough, Musk is buying SolarCity shares just one business day after famed short seller Jim Chanos announced that he was taking a large short position to bet against the solar installer.
Musk has a history of strongly going after short sellers. During an interview with FOX in September 2012, Musk warned that anyone holding a stock position against Tesla Motors will have a “tsunami of hurt” coming for them. During the 12 following months, Tesla’s stock price increased by 461%.
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Elon is a very smart man. Solar and battery is the way of the future, to make a lot of money you need to invest in it now.