VinFast Auto’s first day as a public company was a wild ride, and its founder was there for the whole thing.
The Vietnamese company that makes electric cars ended the week with its shares at $15.40. On Tuesday, its first day of trading on the Nasdaq after joining with a blank-check company, the stock jumped 255% to $37.06. After that, the price went down for three days.
The company’s chairman and founder, Pham Nhat Vuong, owns almost all of the company’s shares. In the same three days, his net worth fell by about 52%, to $21.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Still, Vuong doesn’t feel any pain. Since Bloomberg’s index hadn’t taken into account his stake in VinFast until this week, when the company finished its SPAC merger, he is still a lot richer than he was before the launch.
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On paper, he made almost $40 billion on the first day of trading. This is one of the biggest jumps in wealth that the index has ever seen.
Share prices were likely to go up and down a lot. Vuong holds almost all of VinFast’s stock through his business empire, Vingroup JSC, which owns 99.99 percent of the company’s shares. That only leaves a small amount for other buyers to trade, so even small trades can have a big effect on the price.
On Tuesday, the market of VinFast value peaked at $85 billion. For a short time, it was worth more than General Motors, even though it was on track to make less money this year than GM does in a week. It finished the week with a market value of about $36 billion, which was still more than Rivian Automotive, Nio, and Lucid Group.
