On Wednesday evening it was revealed Elon Musk had started selling Tesla shares, following through on the promise from his weekend Twitter poll.
While mandatory filings with the SEC showed Musk had sold over 676,000 shares of Tesla, after exercising 2.15 million stock options (at $6.24/share), later filings made public on Wednesday night reveal even more stock selling activity from the Tesla CEO.
Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock.
Do you support this?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2021
According to Marketwatch reporter Jeremy Owens, here are the numbers from Musk’s Tesla share sales:
After it was all said and done, Musk sold over 4,522,138 Tesla shares for roughly $4.997 billion. In order to sell 10% of his Tesla shares as he promised on Twitter, Musk would need to sell at least 12.5 million more shares, reports Marketwatch.
Why is Musk selling these Tesla shares? Simply put, he needs to raise money to pay a major tax bill of about $12.5 billion for exercising his stock options. Musk lives a simple life and doesn’t hold billions in cash. This explainer from Fortune is the best we’ve seen.
Here's an update of how many TSLA shares @elonmusk sold over the past 3 days.
Nov 8 – 934,091 shares
Nov 9 – 3,088,047 shares
Nov 10 – 500,000 sharesTotal: 4,522,138 shares sold
(10% of his holdings is ~17m shares, so he's only sold 26.6% so far 🙄). pic.twitter.com/bFtXEnA9R2
— Dave Lee (@heydave7) November 11, 2021
In after-hours trading, Tesla was up 2.63%. Shares of the company closed Wednesday trading up 4.34% at $1,067, ending a recent multi-day sell-off that saw record highs reached last week.
