Last Friday, shares of Tesla were trading just barely under the all-time high they’d reached the day before. Three days later, following Elon Musk’s infamous “should I sell shares ” Twitter poll, the stock had its in over a year. Wouldn’t it have been nice, as a shareholder, to sell off part of your investment on that Friday?
Kimbal Musk, Elon’s - brother, certainly seemed to think so. According to , he sold 88,500 shares of Tesla on Friday, November 5th. Those shares, sold for between $1,223.06 and $1,236.89 each, netted Musk just under $109 million.
Those 88,500 shares accounted for 15% of Musk’s entire stake in Tesla. According to , a tracker of trades from individuals, they also made for Musk’s . between Musk’s trades and the eventual Twitter poll, but they seem to be forgetting a crucial fact: No one can predict what Elon Musk will do on Twitter.
Digging deeper through , Musk’s been very lucky with his Tesla trades. Back on February 9th of last year, he sold 30,000 shares of the company, netting him over $25.5 million just days before Bitcoin and Covid-related factors .
On September 1, 2020, Musk lopped off an even bigger chunk of shares: 36,375 of them for a total haul of $17.5 million. Less than a week later, Tesla was left off a list of companies to be included in the S&P 500 — causing the stock to have its .
On November 12, 2019, Musk sold a whopping 64,285 shares of Tesla. He raked in $22.5 million from the sale, which likely helped him through the stock’s . It seems Kimbal Musk carries a smart, cautious brain under all those cowboy hats.
That brain also seems to be very careful about taxation. Remember those top two lines in the SEC filing, the ones I said would come back later? The latter of the two shows Musk buying 25,000 shares of Tesla for $74.14 each. He’s exercising an option granted to him under his directorship at Tesla, as part of an , that locked in that stock price years ago.
Exercising that option cost Musk nearly $1.9 million, but those shares immediately had a market value of over $30 million. As shown in the first line of the SEC chart, Musk immediately donated them all to charity — saving him a cool $28.9 million in taxes. It’s a , meaning Musk isn’t taking that amount off the top of his reported income, but it’s still a considerable savings.
It looks like the younger Musk is not only a bit of a financial whiz — he’s extraordinarily lucky. To consistently move major holdings in Tesla, always right before a major drop, Kimbal Musk must’ve found some particularly potent four-leaf clovers as a kid. Maybe he keeps them hidden under all the hats.