Elon Musk, fresh off a Twitter poll asking his followers if they supported the idea of him selling a chunk of Tesla stock, has now been confirmed to have sold almost $5 billion in stock.
Musk’s trust, as CNBC reports, was shown in financial filings released Wednesday to have sold more than 3.5 million shares (together worth more than $3.88 billion) in trades that took place on Tuesday and Wednesday. According to the report, these were unscheduled sales.
Meanwhile, additional filings showed that Musk sold another chunk of shares (930,000 of them worth a total of more than $1.1 billion), though that batch was part of a plan that preceded the aforementioned Twitter poll by about two months.
While these shares have been reported to be sold “in part” due to tax and stock option reasons, a separate report from Barron’s clarifies that these latest moves (namely the options being exercised as part of the pre-poll plan) mark “a bullish trade in theory” because he actually carried them out before doing so was required.
By midday on Thursday, Reuters was reporting that Tesla shares had gone higher following the filings that revealed the selling of around $5 billion in stock.
Late last month, Musk claimed he would be willing to sell more than $6 billion in Tesla stock to help “solve world hunger,” provided that the United Nations could detail “exactly how” the funds would be utilized. Also in October, Musk’s Tesla was reported to have become one of a small number of companies to now be worth a trillion bucks.
