Rivian has $0 in revenue and is now the third most valuable carmaker on the planet

By Allison Morrow, CNN Business

Rivian, a 12-year-old startup with no revenue, is now the third most valuable carmaker in the world.

The electric vehicle maker has been public for all of one week, but its share price has more than doubled in that time, valuing Rivian at more than $140 billion — just ahead of Volkswagen ($139 billion), and in third place behind Toyota ($306 billion) and Tesla ($1 trillion).

On Tuesday, the stock opened 6% higher, at about $159 a share. When the company debuted last week, it priced its shares at $78.

Rivian only made its first truck deliveries two months ago, and the vast majority of those were to Rivian employees, according to an SEC filing. Still, it’s ginned up major investor interest with prominent backing from Amazon, which bought a 20% stake in 2019, and Ford. Jeff Bezos is a big fan, and has been seen shuttling his fellow space explorers to and from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site in Rivian’s signature truck.

Electric vehicle hype is nothing new — many analysts, and even Tesla’s own founder Elon Musk, have argued that its Tesla’s valuation is overinflated. But its stock keeps climbing as Wall Street envisions a future in which all-electric vehicles are the norm. Under President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan, signed into law Monday, about $7.5 billion is being set aside to build a nationwide network of plug-in electric vehicle chargers.

Investors who may have missed out on Tesla a decade ago aren’t keen to miss out on another hot EV pioneer.

Rivian also boasts a potential edge over Tesla in the US market, in part because it’s angling for the non-Tesla, or even anti-Tesla, crowd.

Rivian’s primary product is not just any EV — it’s a pickup truck. That’s important in the US market, given that the top three most popular vehicles in the US are the Ford F-150, the Chevy Silverado and the Ram, in that order, according to Edmunds research.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly said Rivian hadn’t brought its vehicles to market. It’s been updated to note that the company made its first deliveries in September of 2021.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.