Elon Musk sells over $15 billion worth Tesla stocks, says almost done with it

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday has said that he was almost done with his sales spree of Tesla shares, after offloading more than $15 billion worth of shares of the EV company for more than one month.

Just a few weeks back, on November 6, Elon Musk created a poll on Twitter asking if he shall sell 10 per cent of his stake in Tesla. Millions of people voted in the poll and 58 per cent among them said Musk should offload 10 per cent of his stake in the EV company. This created a major slide in Tesla value in the stock market.

Since then, Musk offloaded a sizeable chunk of his holdings in the electric car major. This move comes as he is preparing to pay a hefty amount of tax amidst the controversy that rich people should pay more tax in the US.

On Tuesday, Musk said in an interview that he has sold enough stocks to get around 10 per cent plus the option exercise stuff. "I sold enough stock to get to around 10% plus the option exercise stuff and I tried to be extremely literal here," he said in the interview.

However, on Wednesday again, he tweeted that he might not be done with stock sales. "This assumes completion of the 10b sale," he tweeted, referring to his prearranged sales plan related to his options. "There are still a few tranches left, but almost done," he tweeted again later.

As Reuters report, under the Rule 10b5-1 trading plan set up in September, Musk has exercised stock options that expire in 2022 and sold a portion of the stocks to pay taxes. However, following a spree of sales, Tesla CEO still has about 1.5 million stock options that will expire in August 2022. Meanwhile, after Musk's tweet about the offloading of Tesla stocks was almost done, the EV company's shares ended 7.5 per cent higher at $1,008.87, valuing the company at just over $1 trillion.