Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday sold another 583,611 shares in Tesla, according to SEC filings, reports Automotive News.
In an interview with news satire publication The Babylon Bee, Musk said he has now sold “enough stock” to have liquidated 10% of his holdings in Tesla, as promised in his Twitter poll on the subject in November. The interview took place on Sunday evening, however, prior to this latest stock sale.
Tesla stock, which had been hitting one all-time high after another, has lost around a quarter of its value since Musk started dumping shares last month. At the time of writing, Tesla is teetering right at the edge of its $1 trillion USD market capitalization.
“I sold enough stock to get to around 10 percent plus the option exercise stuff and I tried to be extremely literal here,” he told The Babylon Bee.
In a tweet earlier today, Musk clarified that his statements assume the completion of some predetermined stock sales organized under U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule 10b5-1.
This assumes completion of the 10b sales
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2021
As of his most recent stock sale, Musk has sold off 13.5 million Tesla shares in total — that’s about 80% of what he originally planned to dispose of. According to the Tesla CEO, 8.06 million of the 13.5 million shares sold were liquidated to pay taxes related to the exercise of his stock options.
During the interview, Musk criticized the State of California for “over-taxation.”
“California used to be the land of opportunity and now it is… becoming more so the land of overregulation, overlitigation, over-taxation,” he said.
Musk on Sunday revealed that he will be paying over $11 billion USD in taxes this year — the most of any individual in history.
Update: Musk has shed more light on his pre-programmed stock sales in another tweet. The Tesla CEO reiterated that his original goal of selling 10% of his holdings in the company will be complete once those 10b5-1 stock sales go through, and noted that they are “almost done” with only a few tranches left.
When the 10b preprogrammed sales complete. There are still a few tranches left, but almost done.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2021
