December 14, 2021: -Elon Musk is continuing to offload Tesla stock.
The tech billionaire sold 934,091 Tesla shares, according to financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission published late Thursday. The shares are worth $963.2 million.
According to the filings, Musk, the world’s richest man, also exercised stock options to purchase 2.17 million shares of Tesla.
Tesla’s share price was down over 1% in the pre-market trade on Friday, after slipping 6% in the previous session. The Friday fall also came off the back of a tweet where Musk said he’s thinking of quitting his jobs to become an influencer, although it was not clear if he was being serious.
Last month, Musk sold a total of $9.85 billion in Tesla stock, including the $6.9 billion he sold the week of November 10 and another $1.9 billion he sold on November 15 and November 16. Some of the shares were sold in part to satisfy tax obligations related to an exercise of stock options.
On November 6, Musk asked his 62.5 million Twitter followers to determine the future of a chunk of his Tesla holdings. In a Twitter poll, Musk said: “Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose that selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?”
The CEO gave people the option to vote “Yes” or “No” and pledged to abide by the poll results, whichever way it went. Few 3,519,252 people responded, and 57.9% of them voted for “Yes.”
Musk would have started selling millions of shares this quarter regardless of the Twitter poll results. That’s due to the facing a looming tax bill of more than $15 billion.
Musk previously said he was about to sell “a huge block” of his shares in the fourth quarter. In September, Musk said at the Code Conference in Beverly Hills, California, that his marginal tax rate will be over 50% when his stock options expire at Tesla and that he was already planning to sell soon.
“I have a bunch of options that are expiring early next year, so … a huge block of options will sell in Q4 as I have to, or they’ll expire,” he said.
Other current and former Tesla board members, including Robyn Denholm, Kimbal Musk, Ira Ehrenpreis, and Antonio Gracias, have also offloaded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Tesla shares since October 28, as the company’s stock soared on the Nasdaq stock exchange
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