Elon Musk gives up $ 5 billion in Tesla shares, days after Twitter poll | The Guardian Nigeria News

Tesla CEO Elon Musk dumped $ 5 billion worth of company shares a few days after starting a Twitter poll – in which millions voted – asking if he should sell 10 percent of his huge stake in the electric automaker .

The insane billionaire, the richest man in the world with a net worth of roughly $ 300 billion, sold 4.5 million shares this week, according to regulatory filings filed on Wednesday.

But they didn’t imply that the unconventional virtual referendum he issued on Saturday was behind the decision.

A series of shares valued at $ 1.1 billion were sold Monday to meet tax obligations after Musk exercised stock options, but the sale was initiated under a trading plan agreed upon in September, according to records.

It wasn’t clear if the remaining stock sales that were reported Tuesday and Wednesday – roughly 3.6 million shares valued at around $ 4 billion – were also planned ahead of the Twitter poll.

On Saturday, Musk tweeted, “A lot has been done lately with unrealized gains being a tax avoidance tool, so I suggest selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support that? ”

“I will stick to the results of this poll, however they go,” he added in another tweet after posting the vote to his more than 62 million followers.

In the survey, almost 58 percent of 3.5 million votes were in favor of continuing the sale.

Not ten percent
But to get a 10 percent sale of his total stake in Tesla, the 50-year-old South African would have to sell millions more shares this week than he has done before.

Before the sale, he owned more than 170 million Tesla shares, around 17 percent of the shares in the company, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Musk’s net worth rose to $ 1,222.09 last Friday with the recent surge in Tesla stock price from about $ 130 at the beginning of 2020.

Tesla’s stock price plummeted Monday after the weekend poll, hitting its net worth around $ 50 billion, but the automaker bounced back on Wednesday, rising more than four percent to $ 1,067.95.

Musk’s tweets on Saturday followed a proposal by US Democrats in Congress to tax the super-rich more heavily by targeting stocks that would normally only be taxed on sale.

The spectacle unleashed by Musk’s intervention on a very serious issue – income equality in the United States and who should pay for social safety net programs – was not well received by critics.

“Whether or not the richest man in the world pays taxes at all should not depend on the results of a Twitter poll,” tweeted US Senator Ron Wyden.

“It’s time for billionaires’ income tax,” he added, drawing a personal insult in a response from Musk.