(Reuters) Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold shares worth almost $5 billion in the company, days after fans urged him to unload 10% of his holding via a Twitter poll.
Musk’s share sale is speculated to have been planned even before the Twitter poll on Saturday. About $1.1 billion of the share sales are said to have been adopted through a blind trading plan in September.
It is not clear whether Musk’s shares sale on Tuesday and Wednesday were made under the blind trading plan. Executives are known to avoid insider trading suspicions by using the 10b5-1 plan which allows them to spread sales over a period of time.
Musk’s share sale equates to only 3% of his holdings in Tesla. Hyperion Asset Management analyst Mark Arnold says if Musk exercises the 10% stock sale plan, it would affect the company only slightly in the near term as the outlook of the EV maker remains robust.
TSLA: NASDAQ is up +2.63% on premarket.
