Elon Musk has now cashed out $12 billion in Tesla stock in a 5-week selling spree, as he jokes he wants to quit his jobs
- Elon Musk sold Tesla stock worth $963 million on Thursday, and joked he's thinking of quitting his jobs.
- The EV-maker's CEO has now sold nearly $12 billion of shares since asking Twitter whether to sell 10% of his holding.
Elon Musk has sold another $1 billion of Tesla stock, meaning he has cashed in nearly $12 billion in shares since asking Twitter whether he should shed one-tenth of his holdings.
The billionaire took to social media again overnight, this time to tweet that he was thinking of quitting his roles as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX — taken as a joke by his fans.
Musk sold 934,091 shares of the electric-vehicle maker worth $963.2 million on Thursday, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing showed.
But at the same time, he exercised stock options to buy 2.17 million shares in Tesla, at a price of $6.24 each. The stock sales were made to cover tax obligations around the options exercise, according to the SEC filing.
In early November, the Tesla boss asked his Twitter followers whether he should shed 10% of his stock, getting a resounding "yes" in reply.
In the five weeks since then, he has offloaded 11.03 million shares in a series of chunks, bringing the total divestment to $11.82 billion.
The stock's price has dropped 18% since Musk began the selling spree, but is up 42% so far this year. It was down 1.2% in pre-market trading Friday, after falling 6% at Thursday's close.
To hit the 10% target for cutting his holding, Musk would need to have sold about 17 million shares (without counting exercisable options.)
But while the world's richest man has been culling Tesla stock, he has also picked up a hefty amount via exercising options — a total of 12.9 million shares, according to Reuters. That means his acquisitions have outstripped sales, and he has raised his overall stake in the EV-maker.
Even before the Twitter poll, Musk said in September he planned to sell shares to cover the cost of taxes resulting from exercising options that were set to expire in 2022.
Analysts estimated Musk would likely incur a $10 billion tax bill next year from exercising options, which gives him an incentive to liquidate some holdings.
Meanwhile, the Tesla CEO said on Twitter overnight that he's thinking of quitting his jobs to become a full-time influencer — but didn't give any more details. As well as being CEO of the EV maker and aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, Musk is the founder of brain-chip company Neuralink and infrastructure firm The Boring Company.
That meant it wasn't clear whether he was being serious, but Musk is known for his trolling on social media. His replies to comments on the tweet — suggesting he start an OnlyFans account or a YouTube channel — suggested he was joking.