How Elon Musk sold 10 million Tesla shares and…
Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold a massive stake in his company over the past several weeks. And yet he owns 564,000 more shares than he did at the start of the selling spree.
An analysis of his filings shows Musk is not backing away from his holdings in Tesla, despite his promise to follow a poll he sent to his Twitter followers, who called on him to sell 10% of his stake. So far he’s sold 10.1 million shares — about 7 million shares short of the goal.
That’s because at the same time he is selling shares, he’s also exercising options to buy additional stock. And he’s doing so at a bargain exercise price of $6.24 a share, well below 1% of Tesla’s current share price. Since Musk’s Twitter poll on November 6, he has exercised options to buy 10.7 million shares of Tesla. To be clear, he would have done so with or without the poll — the options were due to expire by August of 2022 if he didn’t exercise them.
And Tesla is poised to award Musk even more options, pending its upcoming financial results. His stake in the company is the reason Musk is the richest person on the planet.
