Guru watch

“I was betting on Elon Musk and most people bet against him.“Between 2014 and 2016, Ron Baron bought a 1% stake in electric car manufacturer Tesla for his firm, Baron Capital Management. He has since made a $4bn profit on that bet alone, he tells David Rubenstein on Bloomberg, and “I think we’re gonna make maybe three or four times that in the next ten years”. Baron is just as keen on Musk’s rocketry venture, SpaceX. “They’re innovating at the speed of light.”

Baron’s faith in the oftencontroversial Musk has helped his Baron Partners Fund to beat 99% of its peers over the last three years. So what does he look for in a chief executive? “I want someone who’s really smart, works really hard, has integrity... they have a vision for their business. And they’re good leaders.”

What makes him sell a stock? “I give up because we made a mistake on the business... I don’t give up because a stock doesn’t perform... stock performance isn’t a measure of whether the business is successful or not,” says Baron. “We were an investor in Tesla for... six years and didn’t make a return. And then... we made seven times in a year.”

As for concerns that the stockmarket is overvalued and might crash, Baron, 78, is sanguine. “I don’t worry about it. The only things I am certain of is our economy and our country.” He focuses instead on the long-term cost of living. “I think that the value of my money will fall in half every 17 or 18 years... I regard stocks as a hedge against that depreciation on my currency. So I want to own... shares of businesses that can outpace inflation.”