Twitter users agree with Musk's proposal to sell 10% of his Tesla shares
Tesla Inc CEO Ilon Musk should sell about 10% of his Tesla shares, according to 57.9% of people who voted in his Twitter poll asking users of the social network to get rid of the stake.
"I was prepared to accept any outcome," Musk said after the vote was over.
The world's richest man tweeted on Saturday that he would sell 10% of his shares if users approved the offer.
Musk had previously said he would have to exercise a large number of stock options in the next three months, leading to large tax bills. Selling some of his shares could free up funds to pay taxes.
According to https://exness1.org/review/, Musk's stake in Tesla was about 170.5 million shares as of 30 June, and a 10% sale would have amounted to about $21 billion at the close on Friday.
The poll gathered more than 3.5 million votes.
"A lot has been made lately from unrealised profits, which is a means of tax evasion, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla shares," Musk said on Saturday, adding that he is not taking cash wages or bonuses "from anywhere" but to supply only.
Democrats in the US Senate introduced a proposal to tax billionaires' stocks and other tradable assets to help fund President Joe Biden's social spending programme and fill a loophole that allowed them to defer capital gains taxes indefinitely.
Musk criticised the proposal, saying: "At the end of the day, they run out of other people's money and they come after you."
Senate Finance Committee chairman Ron Weeden, who made the tax proposal, said on Saturday, "Whether the richest person in the world pays taxes at all should not depend on the results of a Twitter poll."
"It's time for a tax on billionaires' profits."
Including stock options, Musk owns 23% of Tesla, the world's most expensive car company, whose market value recently topped $1 trillion. He also owns other valuable companies, including SpaceX.
His brother Kimball Musk on Friday sold 88,500 Tesla shares, becoming the latest board member to get rid of a large number of Tesla shares that have reached record highs.
Musk said on Twitter a week ago that he would sell $6 billion worth of Tesla shares and donate them to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) on the condition that the organisation discloses more information about how it spent its money.
Tesla Bull Gary Black, portfolio manager at The Future Fund, said the potential sale of Musk's shares would result in "1-2 days of moderate pressure from sellers", but said there would be sustained institutional demand to buy shares at a discount.
EXERCISE TAXES ON THE STOCK
Musk said he doesn't want to borrow against the stock to pay taxes because the value of the stock could fall.
According to Tesla, it has an option to buy 22.86 million shares at $6.24 each, which expires on 13 August next year. Exercising the option could result in a profit of about $28 billion, based on Tesla's closing price of $1,222.09 on Friday.
Musk said in September that he was likely to pay taxes on more than half of the profits he would have made from exercising the options. He said last year that he had been moved from California to Texas, which should result in a reduction in his overall tax bill because Texas has no income tax, experts say.
"(It) seems insane to borrow that much to pay taxes, so I have to assume he would need to liquidate a significant portion of the stock acquired through the option exercise to pay taxes," said Brian Springmeyer, a San Francisco attorney. law firm Springmeyer Law.