Elon Musk exercises options, sells Tesla shares worth $1.01 billion
WITH A $284.1 BILLION FORTUNE, MUSK IS RICHER THAN ANYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD, ACCORDING TO THE BLOOMBERG INDEX.
SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk offloaded another $1.01 billion worth of Tesla Inc. shares, advancing toward the goal of selling 10% of his stake in the electric-car maker.
In the latest transaction, the world’s richest person got rid of about 934,000 shares, according to regulatory filings dated Thursday. The sales were to help him offset taxes on the exercise of about 2.1 million options.
That takes the total of shares sold to 10.1 million for about $10.9 billion since Musk asked his Twitter followers on November 6 whether to offload 10% of his Tesla stake, which would represent about 1.7% of the company’s outstanding stock.
He would need to sell even more if taking into account the exercisable options he owns.
While the majority of his Twitter followers answered “yes” to the poll,
Musk had already said in September he was likely to exercise
“a huge block” of options toward the end of this year and had established a pre-arranged trading plan to carry out “an orderly sale of shares related to the exercise of stock options,” filings show.
With a $284.1 billion fortune, Musk is richer than anyone else in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth has surged by $128.1 billion this year as Tesla shares have climbed 54%.
The trades by Musk have helped push the total for CEO and company-insider sales to a record level around $69 billion so far this year, data from investor research firm Verity this week showed.
Venture capital executive Chamath Palihapitiya has said that big stock sales by Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have made him wonder whether he should also be exiting the market.
“Two entrepreneurs who I’ve considered to be the smartest capital allocators of our generation are taking chips off the table,” Palihapitiya wrote in a recent letter to investors.