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Who needs a metaverse when you have Elon Musk’s Twitter feed? In the latest installment, the bad boy billionaire conducted a poll via Tesla Inc’s ersatz communications department, asking real people on the internet whether he should sell roughly $20 billion worth of his shares in the company. The majority verdict: Yes.
So there you have it. The masses have spoken.
Even in this market, the concept that the chief executive would offload that much exposure seems to have registered in the collective brain’s fear pit. Tesla fell by the equivalent of about $78 billion on November 8, or roughly a Ford Motor Co (it had recovered roughly half of that as of writing this). The official line — meaning, stuff Musk tweeted — suggested he had put together this exercise in bot democracy as a high-dudgeon response to calls for higher taxes on very, very rich persons such as himself.
Even at face value that might seem like a weird conflation of a personal itch with the whole managing-a-listed-enterprise thing. Yet, in another, shrinking corner of reality, it could be viewed as the CEO selling a big chunk of stock because it’s trading at a very high price. This quite often marks the moment when it occurs to any stockholder that it might be a good idea to sell some stock. Musk had hinted in an interview some months ago that tax considerations related to old (and now very lucrative) option grants might prompt a sale to cover the tab. One alternative might be for Musk to simply borrow more against the value of his Tesla stake. He has done so for years — roughly half of his stock was pledged as collateral as of August — and that stake is now worth more than $200 billion (plus options to be exercised).
In any case, he is obviously free to sell.
—Bloomberg