Elon Musk has sold roughly $5 billion in Tesla stock this week, and probably isn’t done

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Elon Musk has sold roughly $5 billion in Tesla Inc. stock so far this week, and may not be done.

Filings made public by the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday afternoon showed Musk selling more than 4.5 million Tesla TSLA, +4.34% shares for about $4.997 billion. If he lives up to a promise on Twitter Inc. TWTR, -2.55%, he would sell at least 12.5 million more shares.

The world’s richest man asked his more than 60 million Twitter followers if he should sell 10% of his stock on Saturday, and said he would abide by the results. More than 3.5 million votes were cast, with “yes” winning. Musk had more than 170 million shares of Tesla as of the weekend, which would put him about a quarter of the way toward selling 10% of those shares.

It would be less if Musk doesn’t count the sales he made on Monday, which was part of a plan put in place on Sept. 14, well before the Twitter poll. Musk exercised 2.1 million options that were about to expire and sold more than 930,000 of them, raising $1.1 billion in order to pay taxes on the option exercise.

Musk then sold more than 3 million shares on Tuesday and about half a million shares on Wednesday in 215 separate transactions that collectively netted $3.88 billion. Unlike the Monday sale, these sales were not part of a pre-planned stock sale, known as a 10b5-1, according to the SEC filings.

Musk had previously acknowledged publicly that he would need to sell some Tesla shares for tax purposes, and stands to reap a lot more Tesla stock in the years ahead. The Tesla board gave him performance awards in 2018 with qualifying benchmarks set around market capitalization and other factors, some of which have already been reached.

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