Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold another huge chunk of the automaker’s stock this week, which is another shot of bad news for investors who have seen Tesla’s share price halve this year.
Musk offloaded $3.6 billion of stock in the early part of this week, meaning he has parted with almost $40 billion worth of shares over the course of 2022.
Though it’s unclear if the stock sale is related to Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, which is currently struggling with a huge drop in advertising revenue, this latest stock dump is the second since the Twitter takeover. Musk sold 19.5 million shares worth $3.95 billion immediately following the completion of his Twitter deal in October of this year.
Musk is still the single biggest shareholder at Tesla, but the sale takes his stake in the automaker down to 13.4 percent from 17 percent last year. And that’s not the only thing that’s dropped. Last week Musk was knocked off the top of a list of the world’s richest people.
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Forbes and Bloomberg now rank Louis Vuitton chief Bernard Arnault as the wealthiest man on the planet. Arnault has an estimated $191 billion fortune compared with $174 billion for Musk, though it’s not like the Tesla CEO is going to stress about whether he can afford the steak over the chicken when he goes out for dinner.
“It’s not a good situation,” Tony Sycamore, an analyst at brokerage IG Markets told Reuters on the announcement of Musk’s stock sale. “I’ve spoken to a lot of investors who have Tesla shares and they’re absolutely furious at Elon.”
Tesla was valued at more than $1 trillion at the end of 2021, but when trading on New York’s Nasdaq exchange closed on Wednesday it was worth only $500 billion, its lowest valuation since 2020. The automaker has performed worse than the market average and some investors are worried that an economic slowdown, stronger competition from rivals, and government probes into crashes involving Tesla’s driver-assistance technologies might make for a bumpy road ahead.