Alon Musk revealed today (Friday) that he sold more Tesla shares, while also joking about retiring from his job. According to regulatory documents from Thursday, Tesla CEO sold an additional 934,091 shares worth $ 963 million.
According to the documents, Musk, the richest man in the world, also exercised options to buy 2.17 million Tesla shares. In the past five weeks, it has disposed of shares worth about $ 11.8 billion, some of which were sold to pay tax on the exercise of its options.
A few hours after the documents were released, Musk tweeted about his new “destination”: “Thinking of leaving my jobs and becoming a full-time influencer.” Musk asked millions of his followers what they thought of the idea, and responded to some of them.
thinking of quitting my jobs & becoming an influencer full-time wdyt
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2021
At the start of trading today on Wall Street Stock Tesla Went down, but a few hours later it recovered and began trading in the ups.
Shareholders and regulators have not always appreciated Musk’s humor on Twitter. After announcing on April 1, 2018 that Tesla was “bankrupt,” the company’s shares plummeted. Later that year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued him following tweets that Tesla would become a private company when its share value reached $ 420 – a reference to cannabis culture.
JPMorgan recently filed a $ 162 million lawsuit against Tesla plus expenses, due to damages it was exposed to due to Musk’s tweets.
Last month Musk conducted a Twitter poll around the question of whether to sell 10% of Tesla’s shares, and a few days later he sold more than 3.5 million shares, valued at nearly $ 5 billion.
In the poll, more than 3.5 million surfers voted that Musk would part with holdings worth $ 21 billion – close to 60% of voters said he should do so. Since the survey, Musk has sold more than 11 million shares. It has now gone more than half way, with a cut of a tenth of the company’s direct ownership. If the 10% threshold he referred to includes exercisable options – he will be forced to get rid of another 6 million shares.
Although Musk asked his tens of millions of followers on Twitter to vote in a poll he posted, and told them that their vote would determine the future of his holdings in Tesla – but in fact, he planned in advance to sell his shares. Musk himself had already announced in September that he planned to sell a “huge share” of his shares in the fourth quarter of this year. During the Code 2021 conference in Beverly Hills, the billionaire said that when his Tesla options expire, the tax rate he will have to pay will be more than 50% – so he plans to sell them soon. “I have some expired options early next year, so a huge chunk of them will be sold in the fourth quarter, because I have to do it – or they will expire,” he explained.