Tesla’s Musk Sold Another $1.2 Billion Of Stock On Friday

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc, sold 1.2 million shares held by his trust for more than $1.2 billion on November 12th, according to U.S. securities filings, adding to a multi-billion dollar list of sales announced this week. Musk announced the selling of another 639,737 Tesla shares on Thursday for a total of $687.3 million, before taxes, in two regulatory filings posted Friday morning. The 50-year-old previously sold $5 billion in stock between Monday and Wednesday, bringing his total sales this week to about $5.7 billion, though he’ll take home much less due to taxes.

The ongoing sales come after Musk on Saturday asked Twitter users whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stake in response to a short-lived legislative proposal that would have taxed billionaires’ unrealized stock gains to help curb tax avoidance among the ultra-wealthy. Users overwhelmingly voted for Musk to make the sale, but transactions thus far have represented less than 4% of his stake, meaning he’s far from the supposed goal; he still owns roughly 167 million shares.

It’s still unclear whether Musk, will keep selling stock, but in a Thursday note, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said the 10% sale seemed to be “all in motion.” Ives said the transactions should start to remove an overhang from stock prices as Musk pushes to fulfil a more than $10 billion tax bill from stock options coming due next year, but he expects volatility will continue until Musk completes the sales. Since the company went public on the Nasdaq exchange in 2010. In July 2010, Musk sold slightly more than 1.4 million shares for $24 million, and in 2016, he sold another 2.7 million shares for about $593 million. $ 278.8 billion. That’s how much Musk was worth as of Thursday’s market close-before accounting for the latest sales.