The most impressive advantage of Tesla is their manufacturing advantage for electric cars. Per Diess (CEO VW) Tesla will need only 10 hour to assemble a car from start to finish in GigaBerlin.
VW in Zwickau is at one car after more than 30 hours. They maybe reach more than 20 hours next year. Thats a lot of optimization that VW needs to put into it. And Tesla is not like sleeping either.
You can say what you want but that is a hell of an achievement for 18 year old car company
Did Elon sell according to the result of his poll on twitter?
I guess we should see another steep pullback of the price when/if he does?
The current drop should already reflect this decision?
Rumor has it, he sold it all yesterday, shortly after the opening.
It’s fun since he would have had to sell regardless of the poll (he has a ton of stock option expiring). He’s really good at PR 
He could have collateralized his stock. But yeah, probably this was inevitable. But the panic in the market is endearing.
Yes, might be a solution, but then isn’t he also on the record that he thinks the stock is overvalued? 
Heh it’s even more fun https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1458589206440296451
It looks like Elon Musk has only sold roughly 1/3rd of the shares he was talking about in his Twitter poll: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/12/what-you-need-to-know-about-elon-musks-5point7-billion-tesla-stock-sale.html
For those among us still holding individual shares of TSLA, in this specific situation, where there’s either some predictable downside coming (because of the sheer volume of Musk’s sales at stake), or Musk would go back on his word on Twitter (could be, he could frame it as giving the finger to the short sellers and I guess some of his cohorts would like it), what is the rationale for still holding the stock vs selling now and buying when Musk will be done selling his shares (since we’ll know when that has happened due to his SEC fillings)?
It’d feel like keeping my money in so he can take it out, if it was my money. I’m not sure I’d want to reward the CEO of even the most excellent companies I’m participating in that way.
What would you have liked for Musk to do differently? He has no cash, only loans. This means if he executes his options, he immediately has to sell most of them to pay 54% tax.
The average daily volume of TSLA is 25 million shares traded. If Elon sells 500k per day, that’s roughly 2% of the total. Which seems like the sensible option, rather than dropping it all at once.
And once he’s finished, he will have more stock, not less. “Buys” 22m, sells 17m, ends up with +5m shares.
He could have made the deal behind the scenes, selling to an institutional investor. But I have to say, I much more prefer this transparency, and that more common folk can purchase the stock, and not only the big funds.
Of course, there can be more nuance which I still haven’t figured out about this transaction.
Musk is doing everything right, here, but, after having seen the first drops that took roughly USD 200 out of the stock price, my own thought process would be to sell my shares (if I had any) and then buy back later, hopefully at a lower price.
I’m trying to understand the people who are not selling, because this is alien to me and it is a force that seems to be driving the market these days. In my opinion, the psychology of the participants plays a good part in the behavior of the market (though it’s not all, flows of money, who is in, demographics and a lot of othrer factors play a part, including probably raw randomness). I’m trying to understand the psychology that is going on here.
Edit: to explain my thinking, whales have difficulty moving big sums of money because their actions have an effect on the price of the stock itself. It must have been difficult for Musk to have come up with a strategy mitigating the negative impact of his transactions in order to keep the stock price high, but unless he dilutes his forward transactions a lot, more drops are going to happen. The market should take that into account and adjust prehemptively, except it can’t, because the sales will happen anyway and the impact they will have can’t be smoothed by other participants than Musk or Tesla themselves. So it does almost nothing, almost. There is some selling pressure, but it is very slow and diluted too, is that institutional investors, other whales, trading and trying not to affect the price too much? What are individual investors doing?
How do you know it’s caused by Musk vs by people selling because they think Musk selling will make the price drop?
It’s a meme stock so hard to know why things happen.
That’ a very good question.
The SEC fillings for Monday’s transactions (I can find two of those!?) have a starting price of USD 1196.236 to 1135.05 (so a USD 60 drop), for a volume of less than 5% of the daily trades.
Filing reported in the make it article: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000089924321044060/xslF345X03/doc4.xml
Other filing found randomly with which I don’t know what to do (I’m new at this, feel free to educate me - in which case, thanks! -): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000089924321044077/xslF345X03/doc4.xml
The filing for Tuesday has a price of USD 1172.287 to 1042.544 for a volume of less than 10% of the daily trades: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000089924321044229/xslF345X03/doc4.xml
So at most a fall of USD 190 can be attributed to Elon Musk’s direct actions, though there are a lot of other trades that have happened, and the price went up at some point, allowing for a higher buying price for Musk (so the absolute drop in which his selling is involved would be more of a USD 150 magnitude).
There’s more happening than just Elon Musk selling his shares, I’ll take that as a practice subject to try and understand more about the topic.
Remember, that most countries have capital gains tax. If you sell, you have to cough up a large sum of money for the greedy state. And any gains you can make on speculation will also be subject to tax.
On that subject, I think it’s a good example to show that taxation is eventually a question of: who does a better job in allocating capital (labor, resources), private entrepreneurs, or government officials? You take away capital from Musk, you hopefully can spend it better than him.
It’s like that last manipulative tweet by some UN official: if Musk gave away just $6 billion dollars, it would help solve… World hunger. So many questions pop up in the head. $6 billion dollars is an insignificant amount compared to the entirety of the US budget. They have multiples of this amount at they disposal each day, why don’t they “solve World hunger” with it? Because you can’t just throw money at a problem. If you mismanage, costs of anything can skyrocket before you achieve your goal.
Oh yes, because we can clearly say what drives the price of any other stock, or the entire market, right? Come on. Stock price is an outcome of multiple short and long term interests, liquidity, taxation issues, expiration dates, psychology etc etc. The analysts who tell you why something happened probably aren’t aware of the half of it.
I didn’t say we could do that all the time for other stocks, it still tends to be easier :). Meme stocks are notably harder to understand (by definition they don’t follow fundamentals and tend to not react in predictable ways).
Do the filing explain how things are sold? E.g. if it’s VWAP, the broker might have hedged already some days before.
Btw the last money stuff was about those trades: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-11/elon-musk-sold-some-tesla-stock-kvv74kce
Not that I could find though the Rule 10b5-1 used gives to the broker full discretion as to when to make the trades. The broker can’t act on any material non-public information, though (such as the automatic arrangement that had been taken, probably) so I guess it’s likely they haven’t hedged them beforehand? Thanks for the Bloomberg article, the options exercised may explain part of the other movements on the stock.
Also, reading the filing more carefully (should have done that right of the bat), the two filings for Monday are indeed normal and complete each other (not enough space on just one form). That’s also where we see that the trades were pre-arranged by September 14 and have been automatically executed.
I wonder: can you cancel a pre-arranged sell? What would Elon do in the unlikely scenario that the result of the Twitter poll was NO?
There’s a section dedicated to that question in the Bloomberg article linked by @nabalzbhf. You can cancel the pre-arranged sell but it’s not said that’s what Musk would have done, since he could also have tried to work on words to make it accepted (like: the 10% I was speaking of in the Twitter poll were separated and on top of the already decided plan, related to options I have to exercise, as I have spoken of publicly in September already).
Also, he may have canceled it past Monday and went on manual execution of sales (since the Tuesday and Wednesday sales were not part of the plan).
A lot of "may"s that don’t seem harmful to stock owners as far as I understand. It remains that he has only exercised a tiny bit of the options he had to and had annouced he would in Q4 and sold only a small bit of the shares specified in the poll (and/or that are required to pay the taxes incurred by the exercised options).
This is covered in the Money Stuff article (yes could have been cancelled).
He probably would have still sold to cover the options (but also as explained Musk was very imprecise and it’s unclear if the options are part of what he considered his holdings).
At the time of the poll, Musk owned about 170.5 million shares of Tesla stock. But he was also, for legal purposes, the “beneficial owner” of another 73.5 million shares underlying options; Tesla’s filings show him owning 244 million shares. So if Musk were to sell 10% of his stock that would mean selling somewhere between 17 million and 24 million shares, give or take.
What if people had voted no in the poll? […] One possible answer is: Sell the stock anyway and say “what, no, the poll was about me selling 10% of my stock for vague wealth-tax-protest reasons; this is totally different, this is me exercising options and selling stock to pay taxes on those; actually I have more stock than I did on Saturday; this is unrelated.”