Elon
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, continues his stock selling spree. As per
security filings, the billionaire entrepreneur sold 9,34,000 Tesla shares worth
$1 billion. This brings the total value of shares, Musk dumped in the past
month, to over $10 billion.

Musk,
who has an estimated net worth of $284 billion, had tweeted earlier that he
planned to sell 10% of his Tesla stock. Notably, these sales are an attempt to
pay for an enormous federal tax bill of $11 billion, which Musk triggered while
exercising Tesla’s stock options. Due to Musk’s selling pattern, the stock
prices for Tesla have gone down by 10.7%.

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Investors
have noted that Musk’s behaviour has been putting pressure on the company, but
the share prices are still sky high and are favoured by retail investors. Further,
the share values are up by 50% since the start of 2021. Musk has also said that he plans to exercise stock options which allow him to
buy an additional 2.1 million Tesla shares.

Interestingly,
Musk has tussled with lawmakers in DC, in the past, over tax hikes that were
proposed for the rich. After he sold nearly $6 billion worth of shares in December,
Musk decided to make Bernie Sanders the focus of his humour.

He
replied to Sanders’ demand that the rich should pay their fair share, saying
that it had slipped Musk’s mind that Bernie was still alive. He further dared
the former Presidential candidate that he would sell more shares if Bernie told
him to.

Also Read | Here’s how much Elon Musk lost in a week after Tesla stock sale poll

Even
before locking heads with Sanders, Musk had conducted a poll on Twitter, asking
his followers if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stake, since there was a lot
of talk about unrealized gains becoming a method of tax avoidance. His move
seems to come as a response to this poll, more than anything else. Notably, he
still has to sell over 12 million shares to hit the target.