Elon Musk sells one other $1 billion in Tesla shares, nearing 10% goal

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has offered one other 934,090 shares, or about $1.02 billion value of his holdings, in his electrical automotive and photo voltaic enterprise in accordance with monetary filings printed late Tuesday.

Musk additionally exercised choices to purchase almost 1.6 million Tesla shares at a strike worth of $6.24 per share, granted to him through a 2012 compensation bundle.

In exercising his choices this quarter, Musk’s holdings in Tesla have elevated from about 170.5 million shares to over 177 million shares, the Wall Avenue Journal first reported.

Since Nov. 8, Musk has been on a promoting spree, partly to pay his looming tax payments on these choices.

The celeb-CEO polled his tens of thousands and thousands of Twitter followers within the first week of November asking if he ought to promote 10% of his stake in Tesla. They voted sure. However a significant portion of the gross sales that adopted the entertaining Twitter ballot had been a part of a plan that Musk adopted in September this yr.

Beneath 10b5-1 guidelines, company insiders (together with CEOs) can commerce their very own fairness as a part of pre-announced portfolio administration plan. They have to declare upfront when and the way they plan to commerce to guard themselves from later accusations of insider buying and selling.

This yr, Tesla shares have risen greater than 54% making Musk the world’s wealthiest individual. His web value is now over $275 billion, in accordance with estimates by Forbes.

That wealth is derived from Musk’s possession stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. He at the moment does not take a wage or money bonuses, and had not offered a lot of shares in Tesla till this yr. He had, as a substitute, taken out sizable loans towards a portion of his Tesla shares.

Since taxpayers solely pay taxes on earnings or inventory as soon as it’s offered, Musk by no means paid a big quantity in taxes yearly relative to his web value, ProPublica beforehand reported.

Earlier this month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., tweeted that Musk was “freeloading off everyone else,” since he did not pay federal earnings taxes in 2018.

Now, Musk is anticipated to pay what’s more likely to be the biggest single particular person tax invoice in U.S. historical past, with federal and California earnings taxes estimated to prime $11 billion. He can be required to pay this tax invoice as a way to obtain compensation of greater than $23 billion, within the type of inventory choices that may in any other case expire in August.

The centi-billionaire mentioned his riches and tax technique throughout a bevy of December press appearances, together with interviews with the Monetary Instances and Time Journal after each retailers each named him individual of the yr for 2021.

Capping off his year-end publicity efforts, Elon Musk sat with the conservative satire website The Babylon Bee on Tuesday final week. Throughout that interview he mentioned, “I offered sufficient inventory to get to round 10% plus the choice train stuff and I attempted to be extraordinarily literal right here.”

The subsequent day on Twitter, Musk clarified, “This assumes completion of the 10b sale.” And famous, “When the 10b preprogrammed gross sales full. There are nonetheless a number of tranches left, however nearly accomplished” in a subsequent tweet.

By some estimates, Musk nonetheless has greater than 1,000,000 extra shares to promote to succeed in his 10% November goal of round 17 million shares. Tesla didn’t reply to a request for remark or extra details about the sum complete he plans to promote to hit that objective.

— CNBC’s Thomas Franck and Robert Frank contributed reporting