Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold a chunk of his company stock through his Elon Musk trust. According to a Friday evening filing at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the billionaire sold $1.2 billion stock. Earlier in the week he sold nearly $5 billion in Tesla stock according to financial filings on Wednesday. The worth of the total stock sold is now about $6.9 billion.
Some of the transactions of stock sales were marked as 10b5, which means that they were scheduled sales while others were not marked so, meaning that they had been sold without prior notice. Musk still has more than 166 million shares of Tesla.
The sales of shares by Elon Musk and other partners led to a fall of 15.4 percent in Tesla stock value. This is the steepest fall in weekly performance in about 20 months. The share price had fallen when the lockdowns began during the start of the pandemic. After that Tesla shares rose or remained steady.
Some of the stocks were sold by Musk partly for tax obligations that are related to an exercise of stock option in 2022, where he will be eligible for another huge chunk of shares. Musk does not take a salary from Tesla but gets stock options at scheduled periods of time.
On November 6, Musk had set up a Twitter poll asking his over 60 million followers whether he should sell 10 percent of his Tesla shares. More than 57 percent answered yes to the poll. However, some shares had already been scheduled to be sold this week, regardless of the result of the Twitter poll.
In a September Code Conference, Elon Musk had said that he would most likely sell “a huge block” of his options in the last quarter of the year. He had also said that his marginal tax rate would cross 50 percent when his stock options at the EV car maker expire.
It is also to be noted that the sales of Tesla stock by Musk this week is much less than the 10 percent he had indicated in the Twitter poll. If he is to abide by it, then more stocks have to be sold by him in the coming weeks.
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