Musk Sells 3% Of His Tesla Shares For $5B

After making a promise on Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold about 4.5 million shares of the electric car maker’s stock, raising more than $5 billion, Tom Krisher reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Photo Insert: Tesla CEO Elon Musk oversees the construction of the Gigafactory

The sales, disclosed in 10 regulatory filings late Wednesday, amount to about 3% of Musk’s stake in the company. About $1.1 billion will go toward paying tax obligations for stock options granted to Musk in September.

Last weekend, Musk said he would sell 10% of his holdings in the company, worth more than $20 billion, based on the results of a poll he conducted on Twitter. The sale tweets caused a sell-off of the stock Monday and Tuesday, but it recovered some on Wednesday.

The shares were up 2.6% to $1,096 in extended trading Wednesday, and they have risen more than 50% this year.

The filings also disclosed that Musk exercised options to buy just over 2.1 million shares for $6.24 each.

The company’s stock closed Wednesday at $1,067.95 per share. The tax transactions were “automatically effected” as part of a trading plan adopted on Sept. 14 to sell options that expire next year, according to forms filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

That was nearly two months before he floated the idea of the sale on Twitter.

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