Monday, November 8th, 2021
Company boss sells shares
Musk’s Twitter poll hits Tesla’s course
A single tweet is sometimes enough to affect the share price of a huge corporation. Nobody knows that as well as Tesla boss Elon Musk. With his Twitter survey on the sale of shares, he does not exactly cause enthusiasm among investors.
Tesla shares went downhill at the beginning of the week. Previously, company boss Elon Musk had Twitter users commit to a large share sale. In pre-market trading, the US electric car manufacturer’s paper was at times more than six percent in the red. Musk had asked in a Twitter vote over the weekend whether he should sell a tenth of his Tesla shares in order to pay more taxes. In the Twitter poll, 57.9 percent of the good 3.5 million votes were cast for the sale of shares.
As by far the richest person in the world, Musk has recently been increasingly confronted with demands to contribute more to solving global problems and to pay more taxes. The 50-year-old’s fortune has grown strongly over the past few months with the steady rise in the price of Tesla shares, at least on paper. However, according to the current rules, taxes are only due when he reaps the price gains from a sale.
Musk said on Twitter at the start of the survey that since he does not get a salary or bonus payments, selling stocks is the only way for him to pay taxes. He will stick to the result of the Twitter vote, no matter how it turns out. The package he named would be worth around $ 21 billion (€ 18.18 billion) at the previous closing price on Friday. According to calculations by financial service Bloomberg, the package would correspond to 80 percent of the average daily trading volume of Tesla shares.
Musk did not provide any information on how quickly he would sell the block of shares. Long-term schedules are often set for stock sales by top managers. This is to avoid accusations that they use internal knowledge for clever deals. Musk had already spoken about selling stocks at a conference appearance in September because he would need money to pay taxes on stock options due in the coming year.