Tesla CEO Elon Musk Sells Company Shares Worth $1.01 Billion

Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk exercised more options this week, selling shares of the electric vehicle giant worth $1.01 billion.

Musk sold another 934,091 shares of the company worth $1.01 billion to meet his tax obligations related to the exercise of options to buy 2.1 million shares, regulatory filings showed on Thursday.

The Tesla founder still has an option to buy about 10 million more shares at $6.24 each, which expires in August next year.

Musk had tweeted that he would sell 10% of his stock if users of the social media platform approved just weeks ago. A majority of them had agreed with the sale.

Since Nov. 8, Musk, who is the world’s richest man currently, has exercised options to buy 10.7 million shares and sold 10.1 million shares for $10.9 billion.

This week Musk also made headlines for taking a jab at Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal on Wednesday, tweeting out a meme depicting the executive as Stalin and his predecessor, Jack Dorsey, as Nikolay Yezhov, a Stalin associate who was assassinated under his direction.

It was on Monday that Jack Dorsey announced he would resign from the CEO role. The Twitter co-founder served as CEO from 2006 to 2008 and returned to the role in 2015.

“There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder led’,” Dorsey said in an email to employees shared on Twitter Monday. “Ultimately, I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure. I’ve worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.”

According to Dorsey, Agrawal “has been behind every critical decision that has turned this company around.”

“I want you all to know that this was my decision and I own it. It was a tough one for me, of course. I love this service and company…and all of you so much. I’m really sad…yet really happy.” Dorsey’s email concluded. “There aren’t many companies that get to this level. And there aren’t many founders that choose their company over their ego. I know we’ll prove this was the right move.”

Musk’s tweet comes after Agrawal faced criticism for a previous comment in which he said the social media giant’s role is “not to be bound by the First Amendment.”

Agrawal had previously tweeted: “If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists.”

He later issued a follow-up tweet that he was quoting comedian Asif Mandvi from “The Daily Show”.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.