The Dow Jones Industrial Average could rise as high as 900,000 over the next 50 years, according to longtime investor Ron Baron. Baron explained that most of the growth that’s taken place was in the past 20-40 years and that it’s getting even faster now. “Growth is now beginning to accelerate and over the next 50 years, compared to the last 50 years, I think that you’re going to have faster growth than 7%,” chairman and CEO of Baron Capital told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Friday morning. “That means that you have 35 times your money over the next 50 years, which means that the Dow Jones, which is now 34,000, will be 900,000.” Investors have been bidding up stocks this year in part because of enthusiasm about the growth potential of artificial intelligence. Baron, whose mutual funds are among the most successful of the last three decades, is an investor in growth companies that are making big bets on the future like Tesla and SpaceX. Baron said he doesn’t worry too much about the stock market or what drives it on a daily basis, emphasizing that it has shown resilience time and again through some dark days. “We don’t worry about interest rates, the economy, what the government’s going to do, wars,” he said. “In my whole history there’s never been a ‘good news’ year … yet, the stock market in this whole period of time with terror attacks and inflation and wars and pandemics – with all of that going on, the stock market is up 34 times since 1970.” He highlighted one exceptional year in his career when it seemed to be a so-called good news year: the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet since 1970, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has returned 10% annually, climbing the wall of worry from around the 800 level then to nearly 34,000 today. .DJI ALL mountain Dow Jones Industrial average long term The blue chip stock index closed at 33,946.71 on Thursday. It’s up about 2% in 2023 and 10% in the past year. Baron also highlighted that on top of the stock market performance, U.S. GDP has risen 33 times in the same period. With growing moving at a fast pace, he said it’s likely inflation will also increase and prices will be “twice as expensive” 14 to 15 years down the road as they are today.
