True to his promise, Elon Musk sells 930,000 shares of Tesla stock worth $1.1 billion

Staying true to his followers and keeping up his promise, Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold 930,000 shares of his company stock worth about $1.1 billion. He now owns more than 170 million shares of Tesla.

This came a few days after Musk posted a poll to his Twitter followers asking if he should sell 10 per cent of his stock holdings in the company. He has said that he would “abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.”

The poll came amid pressure in Washington to increase taxes on billionaires. A few Democrats have been wanting to impose a new tax on America’s wealthiest by taxing unrealised capital gains.

Also read | 57.9 percent vote 'yes'; Twitter wants Elon Musk to sell 10 percent of his Tesla stock

“Much is made lately of unrealised gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10 per cent of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?” he tweeted. 

The majority voted in favour of Musk selling ten per cent of his company's stock. There were nearly 3.5 million votes. While 57.9 per cent said they supported the initiative, 42.1 per cent said they were not in favour of it.

Also read | Elon Musk proposes to sell 10% of his Tesla stock in Twitter poll

According to Reuters, Musk held 170.5 million Tesla shares as of June 30.

The so-called “Billionaires Income Tax” would apply solely to 700 taxpayers who have at least $1 billion in assets or $100 million in income for three straight years. According to the proposal, the proposed tax would raise around “hundreds of billions of dollars.”