Musk sold Tesla shares for the fifth consecutive day, and the total cash out reached approximately US$6.9 billion.
According to regulatory documents, Musk sold 1.2 million shares on Friday, valued at approximately $1.2 billion. After asking his Twitter fans whether they should sell 10% of their Tesla shares, he reduced their holdings of shares worth $5.7 billion earlier this week.
Tesla shares fell 2.8% on Friday and closed at $1033.42 in New York. This week’s decline expanded to more than 15%, the largest weekly decline since March 2020.
Musk’s poll of Twitter fans is controversial for many reasons. One of them is that some of Musk’s transactions this week were carried out according to his pre-arranged transaction plan in September, which is much earlier than the time he asked for the opinions of fans on social media. Musk also linked his proposal to the current hot topic in the United States-whether the rich have paid enough taxes and whether unrealized capital gains should be taxed.
Musk did not mention in his tweets over the weekend that he has millions of stock options that must be exercised before expiration in August 2022. He said in September that he might exercise a large portion of these options before the end of this year.
This week’s disclosure document concerning Musk’s shareholding reduction did not explain how his opinion polls would affect his decision to execute some or all of the transactions, nor did it say whether he would continue to reduce holdings until he reached the target of selling 10%. To achieve this goal, he must sell approximately 17 million shares. If he includes the exerciseable options in his total holdings, the number of shares to be sold will be even more. Currently, he has sold approximately 6.4 million shares.
One of Tesla’s most outspoken bulls on Twitter criticized Musk’s way of selling stock. Gary Black, the managing partner of The Future Fund LLC, an investment advisory firm, accused Musk of not only wasting his own money, but also “sluggish.”
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