Tesla returns to $ 1,000 billion club as Musk says share sales near completion
Tesla Inc. is worth $ 1 trillion again, after chief executive Elon Musk said he had finished selling shares.
Tesla TSLA,
shares rose 7.5% to $ 1,008.87 on Wednesday, pushing the stock price above $ 1,000 and the electric car company’s market cap – the value of all shares – topped 1,000 billions of dollars. After hitting that plateau for the first time in October, Tesla fell lower than that mark on December 13, as part of a decline that put the volatile stock in a “bear market” for the third time this year. Stocks will remain in a bear market until they rise 20% from their most recent low, which would mean a stock price of $ 1,079.93, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
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The stock’s gains followed Musk’s statement in an interview on Tuesday that he had finished selling stocks. Musk had promised to sell 10% of his stake, which at the time stood at around 17 million shares; documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that Musk sold about 13.5 million shares for about $ 14 billion.
“I sold enough stocks to hit about 10% plus options exercises, and tried to be extremely literal here,” Musk said in an interview with satirical website The Babylon Bee.
UPDATE: Musk later tweeted that he had “almost completed” his stock sales, and SEC filings revealed another sale of nearly $ 1 billion on Wednesday night.
There could be more SEC filings detailing more sales of shares that have yet to be released publicly. Musk also exercised options when he sells shares, which might actually leave him with more shares than he had when he pledged to sell the shares after asking his followers on Twitter. Inc. TWTR,
about the possibility – the latest filing at Wednesday’s market close in the US showed Musk owns 174.7 million Tesla shares.
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Beyond Musk’s statement, there wasn’t much positive news for Tesla on Wednesday. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, has publicly stated that it is investigating the company for installing a video game on the touch screens of its cars that drivers can play while actively driving the vehicle, adding to two other active investigations into Tesla’s “autopilot” and “”. Full self-driving features.
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Tesla is one of six publicly traded US companies to reach a market cap of $ 1,000 billion, joining five major tech companies with much higher total revenues and profits – Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. GOOGL ,
GOOG,
Amazon.com Inc. AMZN,
Apple Inc. AAPL,
Microsoft Corp. MSFT,
and the parent company of Facebook Meta Platforms Inc. FB,
All except Meta are currently worth over $ 1,000 billion, with Apple and Microsoft exceeding $ 2,000 billion.
Tesla shares have risen 42% so far this year as the S&P 500 SPX index,
gained 23.8%.
