Elon Musk continues to sell Tesla for billions – E24

New documents sent to Finanstilsynet in the US show that Tesla CEO Elon Musk continues to sell shares in the company. According to the documents He sold 637,791 shares on Thursday.

Thursday’s sale is said to have given Musk about NOK 6 billion in cash, and in total this week he has now sold around NOK 50 billion in shares.

This is the first time since 2016 that Musk has sold shares in the company.

Claims to sell stock to pay taxes

Last weekend, Musk asked his Twitter followers if he would sell 10 percent of the company’s stock.

There has been a lot of talk that unrealized gains on stocks are a way to evade taxes, so I’m proposing to sell ten percent of my Tesla stock, Musk wrote on Twitter, sticking to President Joe Biden’s plan to tax billionaires in the United States.

When the vote was taken the next day, 57.9 percent voted in favor of selling the shares.

10% of Musk’s shares were valued at NOK 240 billion when the vote ended, but after the Twitter stunt, Tesla shares took a 15% cut.

The market value that Tesla has taken out over the past week is an amount equal to the full market value of the owner of Ford and Mercedes Damler combined.

By urging Twitter users to give him the green light, Musk has nonetheless been able to sidestep speculation about taking profits from Tesla’s record market capitalization, Reuters writes.

Half a percent sold out so far

If Musk was actually going to sell ten percent of the shares he owned in Tesla when he posted the vote on Twitter, he’s now only a quarter of the way through. Before the vote, he owned 23 percent of the electric car company. Now it’s down to about 22.5 per cent.

Tesla accounts for the bulk of South African wealth today, and Musk joined Tesla as an investor and chairman in 2004, after selling Paypal.

The electric car company was founded by two other entrepreneurs, but after several capital injections, Musk took over as CEO of Tesla in 2008. As a result of a lawsuit settlement between Musk and one of the founders of Tesla a year later, they agreed to let Musk also by calling himself the “co-founder” of Tesla.