Chris Bryant, Columnist

Daimler Must Wish It Had Kept That Tesla Stake

A decent second-quarter performance could prove to be more of a hindrance than a help.

July 17, 2020 at 10:28 AM UTC

Chris Bryant is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Europe. Previously, he was a reporter for the Financial Times.

Taking on Tesla.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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Tesla Inc.’s march to a $275 billion market capitalization has been pretty galling for Germany, the birthplace of the automobile. But the pain is felt most acutely at Daimler AG, which used to be a large Tesla shareholder.

Had the owner of the luxury Mercedes-Benz brand kept hold of the almost 5 million shares it offloaded in 2014, they would now be worth about $7.3 billion by my calculation — a sum that’s equivalent to two-thirds of Daimler’s current net industrial cash position.1