Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, the world’s richest man sold $5bn worth of Tesla Shares Twitter poll. Elon asked his followers on Twitter whether he should sell 10% of his stake in Tesla. His followers voted in favor of him selling some stocks. According to a regulatory filing, the CEO has disposed of more than 4.5 million shares this week.
However, it is believed that the shares were sold based on pre-arranged trading plan set up in September. Hence, it was a plan before Musk’s social media posts at the weekend about selling some of the shares. He also shared that he is not paid in cash but only has stock.
Twitter Poll
Tesla is one of the world’s most valuable carmakers. It is now known for electric cars with a stock market valuation of more than $1tn. Elon Musk trust sold almost $4bn of shares in Tesla.
On Saturday, Elon Musk tweet came about selling the shares of Tesla. The majority of the users agreed with the sale. On Tuesday, the stock sank 12 percent in a multi-day sell-off that put the company position in the $1 trillion clubs, however, it recovered on Wednesday with 4.3 percent.
Art Hogan Chief Market Strategist at National security in New York told Reuters, ‘’ Elon Musk doesn’t take a salary, he’s paid in big chunks of stock. At some point in time, you have to take some of that concentration down. This is not novel. It just gets more attention because it’s such a high market cap type, attention-grabbing kind of company.’’
Elon Musk owns a 23% stake in Tesla. Meanwhile, it is not confirmed that if the sale was related to his weekend Twitter poll, or if he is intended to sell more shares.
Tax Avoidance
Elon Musk Tweeted, ‘’ Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. I will abide by the results of the poll, whichever way it goes.’’
The final results show that almost 57.9% of people said yes to the question, ‘’ Do you support this?’’ and almost 42.1% said no. Meanwhile, Musk is silent after share sales since the poll. Moreover, Musk had his first sale of shares since 2016.
Mark Arnold, chief investment officer at Hyperion Asset Management in Brisbane said, ‘’ if Musk carried out the 10% stock sale plan, it would be a slight negative near term. But the stock is pretty liquid and it’s not a huge percentage of total issued shares, so it should have that much impact. We’re quite comfortable with the viewpoint for the business.’’
