Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, has sold another 934,091 shares worth $1.01 billion to meet tax obligations regarding the exercise of options to buy 2.1 million shares. The move was disclosed in regulatory filings on Thursday.
Musk founded and leads Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. As the CEO of Tesla, he oversees all product designs, engineering and global manufacturing of the company’s electric vehicles, batteries and solar energy products.
Apart from Tesla shares and SpaceX, where Musk serves as the CEO, he has amassed a lot of wealth elsewhere as well, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk gained $8.6 billion since Friday’s closing and more than $52 billion year-to-date.
Elon Musk has sold another $1 billion worth of Tesla Inc. stock, continuing a nearly month-long selloff that is expected to continue. According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchanges Commission on Thursday, Musk exercised options on 2.1 million shares at $6.24 per share and sold more than 934,000 of them at prices ranging from $1,058 to $1,112, making about $1.01 billion.
Following a flurry of sales in the previous weeks, this is the first sale for the Tesla chief executive since November 23. About 10.1 million Tesla shares worth $10.86 billion have been sold by Musk since November 8, a day after a Twitter poll decided he should sell 10% of his Tesla stake. Several of the sales had taken place before the poll was posted.
Musk has more than half of his shares to sell if he is planning to sell 10% of his shares. Before the sales began, Musk’s 10% stake was about 17 million shares – so after Thursday’s sales, he has approximately 6.9 million shares to sell.
The world’s richest man needs to exercise millions of stock options by August 2022, and Musk announced in September that he intended to sell a large chunk of stock in the fourth quarter. Musk faces about $15 billion in tax on the options, CNBC reported last month. Tesla shares TSLA, -0.95% are down more than 10% over the past 30 days, but are still up 48% year to date, and up 54% over the past 12 months.
