Wall Street legend investor Ron Baron heavily invests in Musk: earning 12 billion is not enough, he wants to bet for another 10 years.

He is betting on one of the very few people in this era who can build infrastructure from scratch.

November 14, 2025, Lincoln Center, New York.

The opening theme of the 32nd Baron Investment Conference is just four words: Changing Lives.

The most anticipated segment of the day is a dialogue.

On one side is the legendary 82-year-old investor Ron Baron. He has bet about 40% of his personal assets on Tesla, 25% on SpaceX, and has also invested in xAI, totaling nearly 65% of his wealth tied to Musk.

On the other end of the screen is Elon Musk, the target of his investments for over a decade.

In an interview with CNBC, Baron estimated that since buying Tesla in 2014, this Musk-related investment has earned him and his clients over $12 billion. Of this, $8 billion comes from Tesla, and $4 billion from SpaceX, while the returns from new projects like xAI are still in their early stages.

But the most surprising thing is not this profit, but what he said next:

"I believe that in the next 10 years, we can make five times more on this money."

In his eyes, Musk's business landscape is no longer just electric vehicles and rockets, but a complete system of collaboration consisting of car manufacturing, aerospace, AI factories, humanoid robots, chips, and space power stations.

What he values is not the specific products Musk has created, but how he is personally building the infrastructure for the AI era.

### Section 1: What is Baron betting on?

At the conference in New York, Baron has only one core viewpoint:

"I am not betting on companies; I am betting on people."

This is the starting point for understanding his entire investment logic.

There is a widely circulated story: The first time he met Musk was in 2009, when Tesla had just gone through a round of funding crisis. Baron asked Musk:

"Are you going to continue?"

Musk's answer was simple: Yes. It's worth it.

Baron later said that at that moment he realized: this person is not just running a company; he is putting his whole self into it.

1. He bets on execution ability

Baron is not a technology expert; he admits: I don't understand electric vehicles, rockets, or AI. What I understand is who can get a difficult job done.

What he sees is Musk's determination to push forward even when the going gets tough:

Tesla was on the brink of bankruptcy, and he mortgaged his house to pay salaries.
After three rocket explosions, Musk said if there was one more failure, they would go bankrupt.
xAI released the roadmap for Grok 5 just 18 months after its founding.
While everyone said robots were still far off, he had already put Optimus to work testing in factories.

Every single thing Musk does is so difficult that others can't manage it. But he can endure.

He bets on people who can chew through difficulties.

2. He bets on long-term strategic ability

Baron's style is to wait. He has publicly stated: I invest, and I wait for decades.

He gave an example: In 2012, Tesla had only one model, the Model S, with annual sales of less than 30,000 units. Many investors doubted whether the company could survive, but he kept increasing his stake.

The reason is simple: Musk is not just making cars; he is laying out the future.

From the perspective of 2012, the value of Tesla's layouts was not apparent. But by 2025, the underlying connections become clear.

Baron said: You can't look at one year; you have to look at ten years. His pace of work is not about making money tomorrow but about making the future possible.

3. He bets on combinatorial ability

Baron said at the conference: Every project Musk undertakes seems unrelated, but he is making each one stronger through the others.

Fifteen years ago, Musk told Baron: "The machine that makes the machines" is the most important. While most investors were focused on how many cars were sold, he was already thinking about how to integrate different businesses.

Baron said: Others are just doing business; he is building an ecosystem.

He is investing not in business lines but in combinatorial ability.

4. He bets on resilience

Baron once said on CNBC: I like it when he gets criticized because the stock price becomes cheaper.

At times of panic for others, he is more willing to increase his holdings.

But what best reflects his confidence is a promise. Around 2020, when Tesla's stock price rose from $10-15 to $220, clients began to feel uneasy, worried about their heavy positions. Baron reduced his clients' holdings by 25-30%.

But he didn't sell a single share himself. He promised the board: I will be the last seller. I won't sell a single share until my clients are 100% out. He said: In my lifetime, I will not sell Tesla or SpaceX.

He explained the reason: Most people shrink back when faced with difficulties; Musk does not. Every time he falls, he can climb back up.

He found someone who can turn vision into reality, someone who moves forward the more difficult it gets.

In his words: I see a future in him that others cannot see.

### Section 2: Why does he say Grok is the most important step?

When Ron Baron invested in Tesla, he was waiting for a car to become an opportunity;

When he invested in SpaceX, he was waiting for a launch to become an industry;

And this time, he invested in xAI, waiting to see who would truly control AI.

1. He sees that Musk has mastered the three key elements for an AI company's success

Musk clearly stated in the dialogue that the success of an AI company depends on three things:

Whether it can attract the best talent.
Whether it can invest the largest amount of AI hardware and get GPUs online the fastest.
Whether it has unique data acquisition.

xAI has achieved all three points, and it is built from the ground up: the training data comes from the X platform, the world's best real-time data source; the computing power comes from SpaceX's self-built data centers and chip clusters; the release platform is its own app, its own cars, and its own robots.

In terms of hardware, Jensen Huang even said: I am shocked by their speed in building a data center in such a short time. There is only one person on Earth who can do this.

Others are using AI; Musk is building AI himself.

More importantly: The stronger the AI, the more control over it determines the rules. And Musk holds the complete technology stack, independent of others.

2. He sees that Musk is changing the use of AI

Today, we use search engines, web pages, and browsers; these are old entry points. What Musk wants to create is an assistant that can directly help you understand, analyze, and complete tasks.

Grok is the first version of this new entry point:

It can read PDFs, read code, edit images, and generate videos.
It has its own tone, attitude, and can ask questions, joke, and express emotions.
It is not just a conversation tool; it can help you complete tasks, such as writing copy, checking contracts, and planning driving routes.

For investors, this means AI is transforming from chatting to execution.

And the Grok 5 that Musk is training has seen its parameter scale jump from Grok 4's 30 trillion to 60 trillion, adding video understanding, image recognition, tool invocation, and real-time multimodal processing capabilities. Musk described it as: like a study group meeting in your brain.

More importantly, his judgment: Grok 5 is the first time I feel that we might really achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). Although there is only a 10% chance, this is a feeling I have never had before.

3. He believes Musk's understanding of AI is ahead of others

He is not someone who joined the AI craze halfway. Long before ChatGPT appeared, he had already started laying the groundwork.

Musk founded OpenAI based on a conversation with Google founder Larry Page. Page told him he was a speciesist, favoring computers over humans.

Musk said:

"Which side are you on with computers? I must join the human team."

Thus, he founded OpenAI, with "Open" meaning open source. He provided all the startup funding, recruited core figures like Ilya Sutskever, and even helped OpenAI reach a partnership with Microsoft. But he refused stock options: it is wrong to take stock options in a non-profit organization.

But when OpenAI moved towards closure, he turned around and founded xAI.

He is not being pushed by the AI wave; he is at the starting point of this AI wave.

Baron's bet on xAI is not because of its current strength, but because Musk is not chasing trends; he is defining trends.

### Section 3: The part that no one understands, he bet it all

If Ron Baron bets on Tesla because it can run faster and earn more; then he bets on robots, chips, and satellites because he believes Musk has the ability to build the infrastructure of the future.

These projects, in the eyes of most people, are either too far away or too costly. But in Baron's view, these are precisely the infrastructure for AI to truly land.

1. Optimus is not a robot; it is labor that everyone can access

Musk has made it clear: We are not making a dancing robot; we are making a working robot.

Behind this statement is his changing positioning of Optimus:

From a laboratory concept to a product that can be mass-produced.
From a showcase to a tool that replaces basic labor.

Optimus V3 can already perform the following actions:

Walk autonomously, navigate around obstacles, and recharge itself.
Mimic human hand movements, screw in screws, and handle circuit boards.
Operate with 50 driving components in its hands, capable of handling detailed tasks.
More importantly, the cost target is set below $20,000.

Musk believes that in the future, everyone will want their own Optimus to help take care of family, cook, do housework, and provide companionship.

The application scenarios Musk describes go far beyond household chores: Imagine a world where everyone can access the best surgeons. Optimus will have precision beyond human capabilities, able to perform very complex medical procedures, even surgeries that humans cannot complete.

Even more astonishing is that through the combination with Neuralink brain-machine interfaces, a person who has lost their legs can replace them with Optimus's legs. Neuralink obtains signals from the motor cortex and sends them to Optimus's legs, with a cost of about $60,000.

This is not about making a product; it is about rebuilding the supply of labor. From household chores to surgeries, from companionship to medical care, all can be completed by robots.

And Musk has the ability to bring the cost down to $20,000, making it truly accessible.

2. Chips are not a technology showcase; they are affordable brains

Musk repeatedly emphasizes:

The vast majority of our AI computing tasks and resources will focus on video processing rather than text.

What does this mean?

He is not training an AI to write papers but one that can understand images and comprehend human actions. This means:

Chips must be efficient.
They must compress quickly.
They cannot rely on servers to drive them but must be able to fit into cars, robots, and even spacecraft.

Thus, he personally stepped in to advance the latest chip project called AI5.

Musk admitted at the conference:

"This chip project has encountered problems. Its design is too advanced, and progress is not going smoothly."

So he merged the AI5 and Dojo projects, allowing everyone to focus on AI5, and he got personally involved.

He said: I spent the entire weekend staring at the design of this chip, looking at data, looking at current flow… Now I have a complete layout of the chip in my mind and can imagine every detail.

Because NVIDIA's chips are not optimized for low-power AI inference on robots and cars. The chip he wants to create must have extremely low power consumption, super strong performance, and cost only one-tenth of NVIDIA's.

What does this mean? If successful, the cost of using AI will no longer be hundreds of thousands of dollars a month but just a few hundred.

Musk is not ramping up AI capabilities; he is compressing AI costs.

3. Starlink is not just connectivity; it is an airborne computing power station

Most people only know that Starlink is Musk's satellite internet, but in this dialogue, he revealed a bolder plan:

We will power it with solar energy and move the entire AI data center into space.

This is their real plan. What Musk aims to do is:

Set up data centers in orbit.
Power them with solar energy, eliminating the need for ground factories.
Use Starlink for transmission, distributing globally to form a distributed brain.
The goal is to provide 100 gigawatts of AI power annually.

To put this in perspective, the average electricity consumption in the U.S. is 160 gigawatts. This means the space data center Musk wants to build will have a power output equivalent to about one-fourth of the total electricity output of the United States.

Musk said: The cost of electricity on Earth will only get more expensive. For AI to become widespread, it can only go to space.

This addresses the ultimate bottleneck for the widespread adoption of AI: electricity.

Baron heavily invests in these parts that others do not understand because he knows Musk does not survive on ideas; he survives by bringing production lines to fruition and making things happen.

### Section 4: Why is Baron willing to bet another 10 years?

Baron says that in the next 10 years, he can make five times more. Many people think this is crazy talk. However, he is absolutely confident in this because the AI era has only just begun.

1. The time window he sees: AI infrastructure is not yet built

Baron mentioned: Current AI companies are all working on the application layer.

What is the application layer? It includes products like ChatGPT, Claude, etc., which users can see and access.

What Musk is working on is the infrastructure layer: his own chips, his own data centers, his own computing power network, independent of external suppliers. Moreover, this infrastructure serves physical terminals like cars and robots.

Applications will continue to iterate, but the value of infrastructure will grow exponentially over time. It's like building a highway; initially, the value is not apparent, but as traffic increases, toll booths become cash cows.

While others are optimizing existing products, he is reconstructing the entire operation of AI.

2. He sees AI becoming infrastructure, like electricity

Musk's goal is clear: I want to make AI cheap enough for everyone to use.

Baron understands the weight of this statement.

Today, using AI either requires a subscription or corporate procurement, both of which are not cheap. But what if Musk can reduce the cost of AI to a sufficiently low level?

AI will be as ubiquitous as electricity:

Every car will have AI to help you drive.
Every home will have robots to help you with tasks.
Every person's phone will have AI to help you process information.

This is the confidence that allows him to say he can still make five times more.

Baron's $12 billion was not gambled away; it was earned through patience.

Now he is willing to wait another 10 years because the AI era has just begun, and Musk holds the infrastructure of this era.

### Conclusion: What Baron is betting on is who controls the AI infrastructure

Ron Baron does not need to make five times more.

He is already 82 years old, has made $12 billion through Musk, and has achieved all his financial goals.

Musk does not need to either.

Baron said on CNBC: Why does Musk do this? When your net worth reaches $400 billion, what is the difference between $400 billion and $1 trillion? He is not saving money for a beachfront villa.

He is thinking about how people will remember him in the future, what he has created, and how he has helped humanity survive.

Baron asked Musk: Do you think you are fighting for your legacy?

Musk replied: Yes, absolutely. I am a rational humanist.

It is precisely for this reason that Baron chooses to continue betting. He understands one thing: the infrastructure of the AI era will determine the rules of the game for the next few decades.