Just hours after the world’s richest person filed to show a 934,000 ($1.1 billion) Tesla share sale (on Monday) to cover tax liabilities on the exercise of over 2 million options, a second set of filings (here, here, and here) showed an ever more massive sale of another 3.6 million shares for an average price of about $1,070 in the following two days (or around $3.9 billion).
The interesting thing about the price action this week is that when the sale occurred (Monday and Wednesday), TSLA shares surged as the wave of Musk selling hit.
Combined, the transactions this week represent about $5 billion, or 3%, of Musk’s overall stake.
Elon still owns roughly 167 million Tesla shares.
This is only the third time Musk has sold Tesla stock since the company went public on the Nasdaq exchange in 2010—and it’s easily his biggest transaction. 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.
Elon’s huge sales of TSLA shares this week follow his brother Kimbal Musk – a Tesla board member – sold 15% of his stake on November 5th. That sale of 88,500 shares totalled $109 million.
This sale came days before Elon’s now infamous tweet about whether he should sell 10% of his own stake.