Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unloaded another half a billion dollars worth of his company’s shares on Tuesday, bringing the total to some 80% of what he had planned to sell to pay taxes.
According to regulatory filings, the billionaire has sold around 13.5 million shares for about $14.1 billion since November 6, when he pledged to sell a 10% stake in Tesla to exercise his stock options and pay taxes to the US government. He still has some 3.5 million more shares to dispose of.
In an interview with satirical website Babylon Bee on Sunday, Musk said he had now sold “enough stock” to pay his due to authorities and slammed California, where his company was headquartered up until this month, for “overtaxation.”
“California used to be the land of opportunity and now it is... becoming more so the land of sort of overregulation, overlitigation, overtaxation,” he said, adding that it is “increasingly difficult to get things done” in the Golden State.
Tesla shares, which earlier this year reached record highs, lost nearly a quarter of their value after Musk’s announcement of his share sale, drawing criticism and even a lawsuit from investors.
Of the 13.5 million shares Musk has sold so far, 8.06 million would have to be used to pay taxes related to the options exercise. In total, Musk would have to pay over $11 billion in taxes this year, making him the biggest taxpayer in US history, as he revealed in a Twitter post on Sunday.
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