Elon Musk has sold yet another large chunk of his shares in Tesla (TSLA). According to a Form 4 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published on Wednesday, Musk sold a total of 21,995,000 shares this week.
The sales took place between Monday and Wednesday and varied in price from a low of $156.14 to a high of $176.70. Add it all up and Musk netted approximately $3.6 billion from the sale.
Shares of Tesla have taken a beating in 2022. After starting the year at around $400 (post-split adjusted), prices have dropped nearly 70% over the course of the year, closing at $156.80 on Wednesday, before news of the share sale broke.
The stock has lost more than two-thirds of that amount since Musk announced plans in April to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. The high purchase price has led to the CEO selling nearly 100 million TSLA shares to fund the acquisition, which with Wednesday’s sale now equates to nearly $23 billion, according VerityData, a financial research firm.
Musk’s most recent share sales prior to Wednesday’s was only last month when he sold 19.5 million shares over the three days for a combined total of $3.95 billion.
That sale took place even though Musk said in August that he was done selling after offloading another $6.9 billion in TSLA shares to “avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock.”
However, that sale and statement followed another similar one in April when he said he had no plans to sell more TSLA shares after selling $4 billion worth of TSLA shares to fund the Twitter acquisition.
Musk has now sold approximately $45 billion in Tesla shares over the last two years despite saying in 2013 that his “money was the first in, it will be the last out,”
Forgot to say one thing at Tesla annual shareholders meeting: just as my money was the first in, it will be the last out.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2013
