According to a Twitter vote: Musk sells Tesla shares for nearly $ 700 million

Tesla boss Elon Musk continues to sell shares in his company after a spectacular Twitter vote.

Yesterday, the star entrepreneur sold a further 640,000 shares worth around 687 million dollars (600 million euros), as mandatory reports to the US stock exchange regulator showed.

This week Musk has already cashed in Tesla shares worth about 5.7 billion dollars after Twitter users voted to sell ten percent of his shares in a vote he initiated. So far, however, he has only sold a fraction of it and still holds around 167 million shares.

As the largest single shareholder of Tesla, Musk has profited extremely from the soaring of the electric car manufacturer on the stock exchange in recent years. According to super-rich rankings such as the “Forbes” list or “Bloomberg Billionaires” he is – at least on paper – the richest person in the world. Bloomberg recently estimated his fortune at $ 294 billion, Forbes estimated it at $ 279 billion.

In the Twitter vote, the Tesla boss alluded to a debate about tax avoidance by the super-rich and plans to levy taxes on unrealized price gains, which were already off the table with the US government at the time. What exactly Musk ultimately wanted to achieve remains open. What is certain is that at least a first part of his most recent share sales had been initiated long before the vote on Twitter.

Cash can be used by Musk – who has an extremely large amount of stock assets, but for a multi-billionaire relatively little liquid funds – for tax payments, among other things, which are due due to enormous increases in value when exercising stock options worth billions. On the stock exchange, however, Tesla did not get its sales well: The stock fell 13 percent this week.