▲ Tesla CEO Elon Musk is visiting Grünheide near Berlin, Germany on August 13. Grünheide/Reuters
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk sold a ton of Tesla stock this week, marking the biggest drop in 20 months.
CNBC, an American economic media outlet, reported on the 13th (local time) that Musk had sold about $1.2 billion worth of Tesla stock the day before. As a result, Musk has sold a total of $6.9 billion worth of Tesla stock this week.
After posting a survey on the sale of a 10% stake in Tesla on Twitter on the 6th, CEO Musk sold his stock for five consecutive days. On the 8th, he exercised stock options (stock options) of 2,154,572 shares of Tesla common stock and sold 934,000 of them. After that, a total of 4.24 million shares were additionally sold for three days from the 9th to the 11th, and 1.2 million shares of Tesla were sold again the day before.
Musk’s ‘sales-and-forth’ had an impact on the company’s stock price. Tesla stock fell 15.4% in a week, its biggest drop in 20 months. This is also the largest weekly decline, except when the stock market plummeted due to the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) pandemic in February and March of last year.
Some of the shares were sold, in part, to meet tax obligations related to the exercise of stock options, CNBC reported.
Earlier, on the 6th, CEO Musk said on his Twitter, “Recently, there are a lot of talk about unrealized profits being a means of tax avoidance.” “Whatever conclusions are drawn, we will follow them,” he added. As a result of the survey, a majority of 57.9% of 3,519,252 respondents said that they were in favor of the stock sale.
Meanwhile, Musk still owns more than 166 million shares of Tesla stock.
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