Elon Musk, the billionaire, sold about $2 billion in Tesla Inc. stock on Thursday and Friday, totalling about $7 billion for the week, which was the worst for Tesla stock in over a year. Musk sold more than 600,000 Tesla TSLA, -2.83 percent shares on Thursday and exactly 1.2 million on Friday, for a total of nearly $2 billion, according to SEC filings made public on Friday. The sales come after Tesla’s CEO sold over 4.5 million shares for $5 billion earlier this week.
Musk asked his Twitter followers on Monday if he should sell 10% of his 170 million+ shares, and they responded affirmatively. Musk would still be less than a third of the way there if he excludes his Monday sales, which were from options he exercised and made according to a preset plan to pay the taxes on those options.
The only weeks worse than the one Tesla just had, adjusted for stock splits, were three weeks in February and March last year. The stock market fell 15.4 percent for the week, shattering an 11-week winning streak.
Musk sold 639,737 shares on the open market on Thursday, in a series of transactions at prices ranging from $1,104.01 to $1,056.318, according to the initial Form 4 SEC filings issued on Friday. The stock rose as much as 3.5 percent to an intraday high of $1,104.97 on Thursday before falling as much as 1.2 percent to a low of $1,054.68 before finishing down 0.4 percent at $1,063.51.
According to the disclosures, Musk remains the indirect owner of 166,285,682 shares, valued at $171.8 billion at current prices, after the weekly transactions. Tesla finished the week with a market valuation of $1.04 trillion, making it the fifth most valuable corporation in the United States. Despite the recent downturn, Tesla’s stock has risen 41.7 percent in the last three months, compared to 4.8 percent for the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.72 percent.
