(JustPatriots.com)- Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is in the process of selling a massive amount of stock in his company.
According to financial disclosure documents that were published this week, Musk is selling 930,000 shares of the company he runs, which is worth a total of more than $1.1 billion.
The financial disclosures also report that he initiated the stock sales on September 14, which is before he took to Twitter to survey his followers about whether they’d be OK with him selling shares.
Part of the reason why Musk is selling the shares is that he needs to fulfill obligations to pay personal tax.
The Twitter poll he posted read:
“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?”
People then had the option to vote Yes or No.
After approximately 3.5 million people weighed in on the poll, nearly 58% said they were in favor of him selling the shares, while a little more than 42% said no.
Musk then said he’d “abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.” He then added:
“Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock.”
Musk is also the CEO of SpaceX. Even after the sale of his 930,000 Tesla shares, he still owns more than 170 million shares in the company.
After he posted the poll on Monday night, Tesla stock took a huge dive of more than 15%, according to CNBC. On Wednesday, though, the company’s stock rebounded by more than 4%.
Taking to social media to talk about his stock is nothing new for Musk.
When the director of the United Nations said a small percentage of Musk’s wealth could help stop the issue of world hunger, Musk responded by taking to Twitter. He said that if the UN could provide proof that $6 billion would solve the worldwide hunger crisis, he’d happily sell stock to make it happen.
The debate started when David Beasley, who serves as the director of the World Food Program with the UN, said in an interview with CNN that billionaires need to “step up now, on a one-time basis” to fund the overall effort to fight world hunger. He said:
“Six billion to 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them. It’s not complicated.”
He was pointing to Musk and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who are two of the richest people in the world. CNN posted the story on its website with the headline “2% of Elon Musk’s wealth could solve world hunger, says director of UN food scarcity organization.”
Dr. Eli David, a lecturer, researcher and co-founder at Deep Instinct screen capped that headline, and accompanied it with the tweet:
“2% of @elonmusk’s wealth is $6B. In 2020 the UN World Food Program (WFP) raised $8.4B. How come it didn’t ‘solve world hunger’?”
To which Musk replied:
“If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it. But it must be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent.”
In typical UN fashion, Beasley sort of ducked the question. He responded directly to Musk, but not directly to his request when he wrote:
“I can assure you that we have the systems in place for transparency and open source accounting. Your team can review and work with us to be totally confident of such.”
