It must be a rough holiday season for investors that own a lot of Tesla stock because Tesla CEO Elon Musk can't seem to stop selling off shares. Musk sold another $3.58 billion in Tesla shares this week after selling tens of billions of Tesla stock within the last year. Tesla's stock is down more than 50% this year and is underperforming compared to similar carmaker and tech stocks. Tesla has lost so much value that its primary shareholder Elon Musk is at least temporarily no longer the richest man in the world.
In April of this year Musk said in a Tweet, “No further TSLA sales planned after today.”
Turns out Musk didn't stick to that plan as he's sold Tesla shares multiple times since then.
A year ago Musk owned about 17% of Tesla's stock and after his most recent sale, he now owns 13.4%. To date, Musk has sold around $40 billion dollars worth of Tesla shares recently to the chagrin of loyal Tesla investors. Some of these sales came after Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October. Analysts say Musk overpaid for Twitter, which was valued at around $12 billion at the time of purchase.
Musk is putting coal in the stocking of Tesla holders this year as many have criticized the tech billionaire for selling so much of his position in Tesla while also neglecting his duties at Tesla to work on his other businesses like his newly acquired company, Twitter.