An Elon Musk superfan made the Forbes 400 list after snapping up Tesla stock during the pandemic

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An Elon Musk superfan joined the Forbes 400 list for the first time this year. 
Leo KoGuan is Tesla’s third-largest shareholder and is now worth $7.2 billion. 
KoGuan is among a group of investors who’ve made millions off of Tesla’s soaring share price.

An Elon Musk superfan just joined the Forbes 400 list after going all in on Tesla stock. 

Leo KoGuan, founder of IT firm SHI International, has joined Forbes’ annual list of the world’s wealthiest people for the first time, clocking in at No. 112. With a net worth of $7.2 billion, KoGuan outpaces hedge fund billionaire George Soros and philanthropist Melinda French Gates. 

What makes KoGuan’s wealth so unusual is how he amassed it: by snapping up Tesla stock during the early days of the pandemic. 

In a 2021 interview with Bloomberg, KoGuan said he began trading stocks in 2019, buying up shares of companies like Baidu and Nvidia. But he began losing money and opted to sell all of his shares except his stake in Tesla, whose stock he kept buying — by early 2020, he’d amassed a $1.5 billion stake in the company. Even after the markets tanked in the early weeks of the pandemic, KoGuan doubled down on Tesla, and it paid off. 

KoGuan now owns about 22.6 million shares of Tesla and 1.23 million options, making him the company’s third-largest individual shareholder behind Musk and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

KoGuan told Forbes in 2021 that he’s “Elon’s fanboy.”

Not much is known about how KoGuan spends his wealth, but according to Bloomberg, he’s spent years making donations to Chinese universities. In late 2020, KoGuan reportedly paid about $46 million for a Singapore penthouse owned by vacuum-cleaner tycoon James Dyson. 

KoGuan is one of several individual investors who have become millionaires off the back of Tesla’s meteoric rise. Nicknamed “Teslanaires,” many of these diehard fans invested over a decade ago, made their fortunes on the soaring stock, and held their positions, even during the pandemic downturn or Musk’s headline-making antics.  

 At the start of 2020, Tesla’s stock was trading at about $30 a share. Now it trades for almost 10 times that much. Tesla had stock splits in 2020 and in August of this year.

KoGuan told Bloomberg last year that he’s “all in” on the electric-car maker. “Any money I have I spend on Tesla,” he said.