Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also holds the title of world’s richest person, sold about 900,000 shares of his company on Wednesday, Reported the DW. The shares are worth about $1.1 billion and after the transactions, Musk still holds 170 million Tesla shares.
Musk often takes social media by storm through his tweets and has more than 63.2 million Twitter followers. Recently he conducted a poll on Twitter asking his followers whether he should put 10% of Tesla stocks on sale or not. “Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10 percent of my Tesla stock,” he wrote in his tweet. More than 3.5 million people voted in the poll, with 58 percent in favor of the sale.
On Monday, 3.6 million shares in Tesla, amounting to around $4 billion, were sold by Tesla trust. Musk exercised the options on Monday for a total of $13.4 billion at a price of $6.24 per share. He then sold shares at various levels, making a total of more than $1.1 billion.
But following the survey, Tesla’s stock price plummeted after the poll, implying that Musk sold his stock at a lower price than if he had sold it before his tweet, resulting in a loss of tens of millions of dollars in unrealized profit.
But did Elon simply act on the poll results? The documents suggest otherwise. As the sale began on September 14, this indicates that it was not dependent on the survey’s outcome. Tesla’s stock price saw an enormous upswell and crossed the value of one trillion dollars and this can be confidently said that $1.1 billion isn’t even a tenth of Musk’s Tesla stock value. To fulfill his claim of selling ten percent of his stocks, the 50-year-old entrepreneur will have to unload $20 billion dollars.
What led Musk to sell the stocks? The sale will settle tax obligations for stock options given to Musk in September, according to two regulatory filings. He has also come under public criticism for his claim but the important question that remains for other Tesla investors is that whether this move will affect them as well or not.