Musk sells $1.1 billion in Tesla shares to pay taxes

Detroit: After making a promise on Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold about 9,00,000 shares of the electric car maker's stock, netting over $1.1 billion that will go toward paying tax obligations for stock options.

The sales, disclosed in two regulatory filings late Wednesday, will cover tax obligations for stock options granted to Musk in September. He exercised options to buy just over 2.1 million shares for $6.24 each. The company's stock closed Wednesday at $1,067.95 per share.

The transactions were "automatically effected" as part of a trading plan adopted on September 14 to sell options that expire next year, according to forms filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. That was nearly two months before he floated the idea of the sale on Twitter.

After the transactions, Musk still owns about 170 million Tesla shares.

Musk was Tesla's largest shareholder as of June, owning about 17 per cent of the company, according to data provider FactSet. He's the wealthiest person in the world, according to Forbes, with a net worth of around $282 billion, most of it in Tesla stock.