Michele Tantussi/Reuters
- Tesla Elon Musk has sold $1.01 billion worth of company shares and exercised more buy options.
- Musk still has an option to buy about 10 million more shares at $6.24 each.
- Early last month, Musk tweeted he would sell 10% of his stock if Twitter users approved. Most of them did.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold another 934,091 shares of the electric-vehicle maker worth $1.01 billion to meet his tax obligations related to the exercise of options to buy 2.1 million shares, regulatory filings showed Thursday.
In early November, the world’s richest person tweeted that he would sell 10% of his stock if users of the social media platform approved. A majority of them had agreed with the sale.
Since November 8, Musk has exercised options to buy 10.7 million shares and sold 10.1 million shares for $10.9 billion.
Following a flurry of options exercise, Musk still has an option to buy about 10 million more shares at $6.24 each, which expires in August next year.
The Tesla boss faces big tax bills if he exercises stock options that he was awarded in 2012, when Tesla stock traded at around $6.
The trades by Musk have helped push the total for CEO and company-insider sales to a record level around $69 billion so far this year, data from investor research firm Verity this week showed.
Tesla stock has climbed almost 55% so far this year, and is up more than 1,100% since that March sell-off as of Thursday, when it closed at $1,084.60. Investors are betting that Musk’s company can lead the global green revolution in cars.
Venture capital executive Chamath Palihapitiya has said that big stock sales by Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have made him wonder whether he should also be exiting the market.
“Two entrepreneurs who I’ve considered to be the smartest capital allocators of our generation are taking chips off the table,” Palihapitiya wrote in a recent letter to investors.
