According to the US "Fortune" magazine website reported on the 10th, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on social media Twitter that "I am considering resigning and becoming a full-time Internet celebrity." This remark caused a heated discussion on social media, and netizens even suggested to Musk to go to social networking sites to make videos or live streams.
According to SEC documents, Tesla CEO Musk exercised 2134440 options at $6.24 on December 13 while selling 934091 shares of Tesla stock.
According to statistics, since Musk solicited the opinions of netizens on November 6, he has sold about 12 million Tesla shares so far, worth about $13 billion, which is about 5 million shares away from achieving the goal of "10% of the shares sold is about equal to 17 million shares", and about 70% of the total number of shares sold is currently completed.
Musk said in September that he intended to sell a large number of shares in the fourth quarter. The media reported last month that Musk faces about $15 billion in exercise-related tax bills.
Musk has made a series of sell-offs in recent weeks, with the last time he sold Tesla stock on Dec. 2. Since Nov. 8, Musk has exercised about 12.86 million stock options and sold more than 11.03 million Tesla shares worth nearly $12 billion.
On November 6, Musk launched a poll on Twitter asking its 62.5 million followers if he should sell 10 percent of tesla stock. The poll results show that of the 3.5 million votes, nearly 58% support the sale. In fact, however, the share sale plan was arranged before the voting results were released.
When Musk conducted the survey, he owned about 170 million shares of Tesla stock, 10 percent of which were 17 million. That means Musk has now sold nearly 65 percent of his projected sale, and he has about 6 million shares left for sale.
Speaking of his Tesla, an internal service document released at the end of November showed that due to circuit board problems, Tesla will replace the side relay cameras of some U.S.-made models.
According to media reports earlier this week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has launched an investigation into Tesla because it did not properly notify its shareholders and the public of the related fire risk of solar panels.
At the same time, Tesla is also facing a safety investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTA) into the accident of its assisted driving system.
Musk's pioneering position in many fields is unquestionable, but it also has the same problem of love of hype.
At Tesla AI Day in August 2021, Musk said he would build a humanoid robot called Tesla Bot (code-named Optimus), and the prototype is expected to be released in 2022. Let's start with Tesla's robots. The 5-foot-8-tall robot is designed to weigh 125 pounds, carry 45-pound items, and move at speeds of up to 5 miles per hour. With five fingers on each hand, the robot performs tasks that humans consider "boring, repetitive, and dangerous." To build such a robot, Tesla will need a lot of sensors, connectors, brakes, Tesla cars' self-driving technology (FSD) and some technologies in the field of artificial intelligence.
Fast forward to 2021, and it turns out that Solar Roof is a product that hastily launched and failed to be researched, spending a lot of Tesla money but not getting customer recognition.
Five years ago, Musk also promised to achieve "full autonomous driving" (FSD), a feature that falls far short of the most advanced level 5 autonomous driving. As of 2021, the FSD is still at Level 2, and Tesla had to disclose this in a letter sent to the California Motor Vehicle Administration.
The hype about robots has pushed up Tesla's stock price, masked the concerns, uncertainty and skepticism raised by in-depth investigative news reports, reassured investors and attracted new talent to Tesla's robotics division. Musk has been a pioneer in many areas, and it can be seen that he is doing the same thing in the field of robotics. Robots have been around for many years in the consumer and industrial sectors, but Tesla's robots will be unprecedented.
And back to self-driving, Musk also made an unfulfilled promise in 2019, when he announced that 1 million Tesla self-driving taxis would be on the road by 2020. But what we're seeing is not a car that can automatically pick up and drop off passengers and make money for car owners, but a "smart call" function that does not belong to autonomous driving at all.
Soon after the "Smart Summon" feature was launched, it received various complaints from users, including inexplicable wayfinding patterns and crashes that caused thousands of dollars in damage. But Musk still insists there is room for improvement in the feature.
Musk, the self-proclaimed "Technoking of Tesla," has made too many promises that have never been fulfilled, and now there are even many websites that take stock of those unfulfilled promises.