Thanks to the success of Tesla, Elon Musk is now the richest man in the world. However, thanks to its investments, investors in Baillie Gifford’s Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust are the second-biggest winners in the electric car company.

The Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, which is managed by Baillie Gifford, started buying Tesla heavily in 2013 when the shares were changing hands at about $6 each. Tesla’s shares, which have risen by 640% in the past year alone, closed at $846 on Friday, valuing the firm at $802bn.

The skyrocketingTesla share price led Scottish Mortgage to be admitted into the FTSE 100 index of the UK’s biggest listed companies in 2017. Last year the trust was the best performing company in the FTSE 100.

The Scottish Mortgage data comes as Tesla is expected to report its sixth consecutive quarter of increased profits on Wednesday, following years of losses as it invested in getting the technology right. Tesla is expected to record fourth-quarter sales of $10.5bn, up from $7.4bn a year earlier.

As the car company’s share price continued to increase dramatically, it triggered an alarm that the stake had crossed the maximum percentage value that Scottish Mortgage was able to hold in any single stock. That meant fund managers James Anderson and Tom Slater had to sell Tesla shares.

As a result, Edinburgh-based Baillie Gifford has made a $14.8bn profit from Tesla shares it has sold. It also retains Tesla shares worth $19.5bn. If it sold those now, the total profit its investors would have made from Tesla amounts to $29bn.

Mr Anderson told The Guardian in an interview, if the fund had not acted to sell some of the Tesla shares, the stock would have accounted for more than a third of the whole fund. Tesla is still Scottish Mortgage’s largest holding at 8.9% of total assets.

Explaining why he first bought Tesla, at a time when many experienced investors thought it was hugely overvalued, Mr Anderson said: “To us it was, frankly, clear even back half a dozen years that the underlying technologies from batteries, to solar to eventually self-driving, were progressing and would continue to do so.

“We thought (and simply observed) that Tesla was already past the technological and practical challenges to a good degree and that execution and finance were the practical issues. What we needed was time. Not many investors can have that luxury and necessity.”

Mr Anderson said he believes the electric car revolution “could only be done by a visionary from outside the traditional industry”, and said that Musk deserves the record-breaking $55.8bn bonus he is on track to collect.

He added Scottish Mortgage had used the funds realised by selling Tesla shares to buy into other future tech firms, such as the Swedish green battery maker Northvolt.