Elon Musk Sells Off Another $1 Billion Of Shares

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has continued to offload shares, as he faces a colossal tax bill in the months ahead.

Musk has sold another 934,090 shares, or about $1.02 billion worth of his holdings in Tesla, according to financial filings published late Tuesday.

Musk has recently revealed that he is facing a tax bill this year of more than $11 billion, hitting back at an accusation from Democratic US Senator Elizabeth Warren that he was freeloading.

Share sell-off

Since 8 November, Musk has sold off billions of dollars worth of Tesla stock, after he asked Twitter users whether he should sell 10 percent of his shareholding in Tesla.

The response was yes he should offload the shares.

Musk then repeatedly sold tranches of shares so he could honour his Twitter promise.

Now CNBC has reported that Musk has also exercised options to buy nearly 1.6 million Tesla shares at a strike price of $6.24 per share, granted to him via a 2012 compensation package.

In exercising his options this quarter, Musk’s holdings in Tesla have increased from about 170.5 million shares to over 177 million shares, the Wall Street Journal first reported.

Vast wealth

Musk of course is the world’s wealthiest person, and is said to be worth over $275 billion, according to estimates by Forbes.

That wealth is derived from Musk’s ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX.

Musk currently doesn’t take a salary or cash bonuses, and had not sold a large number of shares in Tesla until this year.

Instead he had taken loans against a portion of his Tesla shares.

By some estimates, Musk still has more than a million more shares to sell to reach his 10 percent 17 million share target.