Financial Associated Press (Shanghai, editor Zhao Hao) news, Elon Musk was elected as time magazine's person of the year, his pace of cashing out Tesla stock has not stopped.
According to a set of financial documents released by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) late Monday, Musk reduced his holdings in 934,091 more Tesla shares, cashing out about $906.5 million (about 5.73 billion yuan).
At the same time, he also exercised an option to buy 2,134,440 shares at an strike price of $6.24 per share. This right comes from the Company's 2012 compensation package. According to the document, Musk's exercise has been mentioned in the "10B5-1" trading plan announced by the SEC on September 14.
The program allows company insiders to execute trading in their own company's shares at a specific price on a set future date. The options expire in August next year, and Musk is subject to income tax on gains earned on exercise.
Since Saturday, November 6, Musk tweeted that he would reduce his 10% stake in Tesla stock, he has sold a total of 12 million shares. In total, he sold $9.85 billion worth of Tesla stock in November, and he sold $2.87 billion in December.
By the standards he tweeted at the time, he needed to sell about 5 million more shares to deliver on his promise, and the market is still speculating about when the sale will be completed.
Tesla closed down 4.98 percent on Monday at $966.41 a share, slipping 21 percent from its Nov. 4 high and entering a technical bear market. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk's value peaked on November 4 this year — $340 billion, and his fortune has shrunk by more than 25 percent due to the plunge in Tesla's stock price, but still ranks first with $254 billion.
Elected "Person of the Year"
It is worth mentioning that the title of "world's richest man" is not the whole reason why Musk became Time magazine's 2021 Person of the Year.
Those familiar with Time magazine's Annual Person of the Year selection rules should know that this selection generally pays more attention to the influence of the character, or relevance to the global theme of the year, and the final result may even be a "negative image" of the character.
Musk's election is not a surprise, and tesla has managed to break through the trillion-dollar market value as the green economy has become the focus of global political economy. In addition, the bold idea of "colonizing Mars", the untamed personality and the controversy that makes people love and hate polarize have also attracted wide attention for the words and deeds of the world's new richest man.
This is naturally also evident in musk's sale process. He used a never-before-decided approach — Twitter voting on whether to sell 10 percent of the stock— and he spoke out against senators who supported taxes on the wealthy.
Recently, Musk said at the "CEO Summit" hosted by the Wall Street Journal that "if all American billionaires are cleared, there will be no solution to the US deficit problem." Last week, Musk tweeted that he was "considering quitting all his jobs and devoting himself to the cause of internet celebrities" and solicited the opinions of netizens.
But it is the controversial richest man who founded Tesla, which no one in the electric vehicle industry can match. In April, his SpaceX was also awarded an exclusive contract from NASA to reintroduce American astronauts to the moon since 1972.
Time labeled Musk "visionary, acting-savvy, innovative, and controversial" because he "provided solutions to existential crises, embodied the possibilities and dangers of the age of tech giants, and drove the boldest and most disruptive changes in society."