Musk sells USD 1.1B in Tesla shares to pay taxes

After making a promise on Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold about 900,000 shares of the electric car maker’s stock, netting over USD 1.1 billion that will go toward paying tax obligations for stock options.

The sales, disclosed in two regulatory filings late Wednesday, will cover tax obligations for stock options granted to Musk in September. He exercised options to buy just over 2.1 million shares for USD 6.24 each. The company’s stock closed Wednesday at USD 1,067.95 per share. The transactions were automatically effected as part of a trading plan adopted on Sept. 14 to sell options that expire next year, according to forms filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That was nearly two months before he floated the idea of the sale on Twitter.

After the transactions, Musk still owns about 170 million Tesla shares.

Musk was Tesla’s largest shareholder as of June, owning about 17 per cent of the company, according to data provider FactSet. He’s the wealthiest person in the world, according to Forbes, with a net worth of around USD 282 billion, most of it in Tesla stock.

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