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From a penthouse overlooking the pale blue Singapore Strait, a discreet billionaire made a startling claim: he’d quietly amassed one of the single biggest stakes in Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc.

“I believe in Elon’s great mission,” Leo KoGuan told the world via Twitter.

And with that one tweet in September, KoGuan — already a billionaire in his own right — began to dribble out details to believers and skeptics alike. More, the value of his supposed holdings soared and soared: to US$4 billion, US$5 billion — and, now, to more than US$7 billion.

Is it true? Could a single obscure investor, even one as wealthy as KoGuan, amass such a huge position in a company like Tesla with scarcely anyone noticing? Could he really have become Tesla’s third-largest individual shareholder, behind fellow billionaire Larry Ellison and none other than Elon Musk, the richest person in history?

Yes. Bank records provided to Bloomberg News by KoGuan and confirmed by people familiar with his investments show he owned 6.31 million Tesla shares as of late September. He also held 1.82 million options giving him the right to buy Tesla between US$450 to US$550 a share — contracts that are deeply in the money after the stock closed at US$1,114 on Friday in New York.

Speaking via Zoom from his living room 63 floors above Singapore’s harbour, KoGuan, 66, provided a glimpse into his astonishing investment. The view from his aerie — a world away from the New Jersey technology business he co-owns — stretches from Batam Island to the south to Malaysia to the north to Indonesia to the west.

Wearing a white T-shirt, KoGuan laid out a no-frills roadmap to his trading riches: stick to a single stock, in this case, Tesla; keep doubling down; and, most important, believe in Elon Musk.

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,” KoGuan says. “Fortunately, I win more of the time than I lose.”