Dec 15 (Reuters) – Tesla (TLSA.O) boss Elon Musk disclosed another $3.6 billion in stock sales on Wednesday, bringing his total sales for the year to nearly $40 billion, giving investors a boost. Investors were frustrated as the company’s shares fell to a two-year low.
He sold 22 million shares of the world’s most valuable automaker over three days from Monday to Wednesday, a U.S. securities filing showed.
The sale is the second largest stock he has cashed out since he bought Twitter for $44 billion last October. It’s unclear whether those sales were related to Twitter’s acquisition, but they irritated investors who believed he was directing attention and resources to Twitter instead of Tesla.
“It doesn’t give a lot of confidence to the business or where his focus is,” said Tony Sycamore, an analyst at brokerage IG Markets, a small investor in Tesla. Popular stocks in .
“It’s not a good situation. I’ve talked to a lot of investors who own Tesla stock and they’re very mad at Elon.”
Reuters asked Tesla and Musk to email comment outside business hours, but there was no immediate response. Musk owns 13.4 percent of Tesla, down from about 17 percent a year ago, according to Refinitiv data.
Shares of Tesla have halved this year, underperforming the automaker (.SPLRCAUTM ) and the broader tech Nasdaq (.IXIC ), which is down about 30% this year. Musk’s total sales over the past year were close to $40 billion.
“It’s going to start to wear out investors,” said Tareck Horchani, head of prime brokerage at Maybank Securities in Singapore.
dilute
Musk, whose fortune is largely tied to Tesla stock, lost his title as the world’s richest man briefly last week – according to Forbes – when he was overtaken by Louis Vuitton boss Bernard Arnault this year as shares fell.
In addition to Tesla and Twitter, where Musk’s management and tweets have drawn political attention and repercussions, Musk also leads the rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a company that develops interfaces to connect the human brain to computers. start-up companies.
Tesla, meanwhile, is grappling with lingering logistical challenges and said in October that it doesn’t expect to meet its vehicle delivery targets for the year. It is more profitable than rivals struggling to make money selling electric vehicles.
The latest stock offering comes a month after Musk sold $4 billion worth of stock within days of closing the Twitter deal.
Tesla investor Ross Gerber, a staunch Musk supporter, tweeted that Tesla should announce a buyback “to take advantage of the low stock price created by (sic) Elon.”
Reporting by Maria Ponnezhath in Bengaluru and Hyunjoo Jin in San Francisco; writing and additional reporting by Tom Westbrook in Singapore. Edited by Devika Syamanath and Raju Gopalakrishnan
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.