The Tesla CEO has had to sell billions of dollars worth of shares to pay his bill.
Elon Musk will pay the biggest tax bill in U.S. history this upcoming tax season. This weekend, the Tesla CEO tweeted, unprompted, “For those wondering, I will pay over $11 billion in taxes this year.” Last month, Musk made waves with a Twitter poll asking his 61 million followers whether he should sell a 10% chunk of his stake in Tesla. The results were strongly in favor of the sale, and over the ensuing weeks Musk sold $14 billion worth of shares in his company. But there’s another reason why Musk needed to start selling shares: stock options. The world’s richest man — whose net worth currently stands at $243 billion, according to Bloomberg — needed to sell shares to pay off a major tax bill that he is incurring by exercising stock options.
