Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold another 639,737 shares of the electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer for around $687 million USD through his trust on Thursday, according to regulatory filings discovered earlier today (via CNBC).
Last week, Musk asked the masses whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock in a Twitter poll. With nearly 58% of the 3.5 million votes cast favouring ‘Yes’, Musk and his trust exercised 2.15 million stock options (at $6.24/share) and sold some 4.5 million Tesla shares for $5 billion USD by Wednesday.
With Musk liquidating such a large chunk of Tesla stock, the share price fell 16% over the course of two days before recovering slightly. At the time of writing, Tesla stock stands at $1,023 USD, down 3.81% for the day.
The Thursday sale puts Musk’s total shares sold over 5.1 million, with proceeds in excess of $5.5 billion USD. According to estimates, Musk has so far only sold less than 1/3 of the 10% holdings (about 17 million shares) he said he would. The Tesla CEO still owns around 167 million shares in the company.
I think at this point we need to assume that @elonmusk is selling TSLA shares every day until he announces that he's stopped selling or has sold at least 17m shares (10% of his holdings)
This morning new Form 4s were filed showing he sold 639,737 shares yesterday. pic.twitter.com/lZ4aORy992
— Dave Lee (@heydave7) November 12, 2021
Last month, Tesla broke $1 trillion USD in market capitalization for the first time ever. If Musk continues to offload shares in bulk without stock price recovering, however, Tesla may soon lose its status as a trillion-dollar company.
