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Investing.com – Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) traded 2.3% higher in Wednesday’s premarket trading as Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk exercised all of his options expiring next year, an indication that he is close to meeting his pledge of selling 10% of his stake in the EV-maker if he hasn’t already honored it.
With Tuesday’s option exercise on 1.6 million shares on Tuesday, Musk, already the company’s largest shareholder, has exercised all of the options on 22.8 million shares, which were due to expire in August. He also sold 934,090 shares for $1.02 billion to pay for taxes, the filings showed. The filings said the preset 10B5-1 trading plan was completed on Tuesday.
The maverick CEO has sold Tesla shares in several tranches since he conducted a Twitter poll November 7 asking whether he should sell 10% of his stake in Tesla.
While the poll made it look like Musk would be directed by popular opinion – and the voting eventually favored him selling the stake – it was always likely to happen, as he needed money to pay a large tax bill on his newly acquired Tesla stock from the options due to expire, or else give up billions of dollars worth in options.
The latest sale takes Musk’s total to about 15.6 million shares, for around $16.4 billion.
According to Bloomberg, Musk needs to sell another 1.4 million shares to complete his pledge of offloading 10% of his stake, assuming the pledge excludes exercisable options.
If his exercisable options are factored into his overall ownership, he’ll need to sell even more.
Tesla has dropped 11% since the Musk poll, though that poll also coincided with an all-time high for shares. The company’s shares are up over 50% year to date, and it drew sell-side price target hikes yesterday.
