Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Matt Rourke/AP Photo
- Tesla shares jumped as much as 8% on Wednesday after CEO Elon Musk said he was done selling his shares.
- “I sold enough stock to get to around 10%, plus the option exercise stuff,” he said in an interview with The Babylon Bee.
- Separately, Tesla moved one step closer towards receiving approval for its Berlin Gigafactory.
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Tesla shares jumped as much as 8% on Wednesday, helping reverse a one-month decline of nearly 30% after CEO Elon Musk said he was done selling his shares in the company.
Musk had originally tweeted a poll to his millions of followers in early November, asking them whether he should sell 10% of his stake in Tesla to pay taxes on his unrealized gains. A majority of the more than 3.5 million votes cast were in favor of Musk selling.
Since then, Musk has sold tranches of shares worth billions of dollars. And yet due to several option exercises, Musk’s ownership in Tesla actually increased from when he first began selling.
“I sold enough stock to get to around 10%, plus the option exercise stuff,” he said in an interview with The Babylon Bee.
With Musk’s share sales now in the rear-view mirror, investors could once again shift their focus to the underlying fundamentals of the growing electric vehicle manufacturer. The company made progress on Wednesday towards receiving approval to begin vehicle production at its Gigafactory in Berlin, according to a Reuters report.
The company and German authorities submitted all the necessary documents for the approval process of the factory, as it has run into environmental roadblocks that required certain periods of public consultations. The first vehicles are expected to roll off the Berlin factory line in early 2022, a slight delay from its initial timeline of late 2021.
The rise in Tesla over the past week comes even after the failure of President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation following Senator Joe Manchin’s rejection of the bill. That legislation included billions of dollars for the electric vehicle industry, including a network of charging stations that would help accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.
Despite the failure of the bill, Tesla shares have proven resilient. The stock is up 42% year-to-date, far outpacing the S&P 500’s gain of about 26%.
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