By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) was Thursday looking to add to its previous day’s gains as the dust over Elon Musk’s $5-billion sale of shares settles.
The stock was up 4% premarket after closing 4.3% higher Wednesday.
The block sale by Tesla's CEO had dragged the electric vehicle maker’s market value below $1 trillion, a milestone it only recently achieved, as the market absorbed the sudden increase in supply. The rout also shaved a substantial sum off Musk's paper wealth, given that most of it is accounted for by his remaining holdings of Tesla stock. Tesla regained its trillion-dollar valuation Wednesday.
After selling less than 1% of his holding Monday, Musk sold about 2% over the next two days, according to regulatory notices. He sold around 4.5 million shares in all, more than what he bought through exercising the options.
The sale comes days after Musk took to Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) on November 7 to seek his followers’ vote on whether he should sell 10% of his stake in Tesla. He framed the question as a response to recent proposals from Democratic lawmakers to tax unrealized stock gains, as a way to fund their deadlocked spending bill. Musk would have had to pay a large tax bill on his newly acquired stock irrespective of the Twitter poll. However, that appears to have been covered - and then some - by the stock sale.
Musk has more than 20 million further stock options that are due to expire in August of next year, according to Reuters.