Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Lucrative options drawn
Musk continues stock sell-off
Elon Musk pretends to pay more tax by selling Tesla shares. However, the richest person in the world on paper is also pushing a plan that has been prepared for some time. Now he is busy relinquishing shares again – but at the same time pulling lucrative options.
Tesla boss Elon Musk is making great strides in the sale of shares that he initiated with a Twitter poll. He sold papers from the electric car maker valued at around $ 930 million on Monday. According to a notice to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the billionaire struck 934,091 Tesla shares after exercising options to buy 2.1 million shares at $ 6.24 each. Like a similar sale a week earlier, the transactions are part of a plan set in mid-September, according to notifications to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Musk had Twitter users vote a good week ago whether he should part with ten percent of his Tesla stake in order to pay more taxes. The proposal prevailed with around 58 percent of the votes cast. The package was worth around $ 21 billion at the time, but the stock price fell according to the survey.
Not quite that spontaneous?
The documents at the US Securities and Exchange Commission show that Musk wanted to sell at least part of the shares now sold independently of the Twitter vote and has been preparing this for about two months. The background to this is Musk’s need for cash in order to be able to pay taxes and take advantage of options to buy more Tesla shares.
Musk has sold approximately $ 7.8 billion in total shares since the Twitter vote. Of this, around two billion dollars go back to the September sales plan with the drawing of the stock options, as previous Tesla announcements show.
Musk is using the sale to refinance his options from 2012 on more than 20 million Tesla shares. He has until the end of August 2022 to redeem them, otherwise they will expire. These papers are priced at $ 6.24. That said, Musk can buy a block of shares for $ 145 million, which is currently worth nearly $ 28 billion. The Tesla boss has to pay taxes on the difference to the current exchange rate of a good $ 1,000. The bottom line was that there was still just under $ 13 billion left.
By drawing the options, Musk still holds around 167.5 million Tesla shares after the most recent sale. Musk had said to the Twitter poll that sales of stocks are the only way for him to pay taxes because he does not receive any salary or bonus payments from Tesla. As by far the richest person in the world, at least on paper, he has recently been increasingly confronted with demands to contribute more to the common good.