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What a sodding absurd calculation

Elon Musk has saved almost $2bn on his tax bill after a poll asking Twitter users if he should sell 10pc of his stake in Tesla sparked a sharp drop in the carmaker’s shares.

Tesla’s shares have fallen by more than 10pc since the weekend, whittling down the value of Mr Musk’s holdings, after he promised to heed a vote on social media to offload stock.

That also had the effect of reducing Mr Musk’s taxable gains – and therefore the potential bill he will have to pay US authorities – a Telegraph analysis has found.

Seriously, nonsense.

The resulting share price fall following his tweet saved Musk almost $2bn in tax.

Cretins.

12 thoughts on “What a sodding absurd calculation”

  1. They’ve missed a trick. Apparently, Musk’s sale of 10% would give him c£28bn, leaving him with a tax bill of c$15bn.

    By NOT selling the other 90% of his holding, he’s clearly avoided a tax bill of $135bn.

    What a rotter.

  2. They missed another trick…
    If he’d simply gone and sold 10% of his stock without the Twatter “consultation” the mess would have been… impressive.. and peeps would have been screaming bloody murder while running around in a panic.

    I’ve the feeling Musk pulled a very clever trick here.

  3. Did you see whee he said he would start a woke free college? It would be called the Texas Institute of Technology and Science. Said he’d make the money back on the merch alone.

  4. Grikath,

    “If he’d simply gone and sold 10% of his stock without the Twatter “consultation” the mess would have been… impressive.. and peeps would have been screaming bloody murder while running around in a panic.

    I’ve the feeling Musk pulled a very clever trick here.”

    It’s a genius move. My sense is that Elon knows the stock is wildly overpriced, so he wants to cash some in. But if he just sold it, confidence would go to shit very quickly. Make it about the tax thing, and it deflects from that. And he’d have known that Twitter would have voted for him to sell.

    The amount he’s made, even after tax, is probably enough to buy the whole company when the bubble bursts.

  5. Musk didn’t just ‘sell stock’, he exercised stock options, then sold some of them to pay the tax bill. Not only that, very oddly the fall in Tesla shares came after he’d sold his first tranche. And rose again when he sold his second tranche. So he managed to sell into a rising market, twice, presumably thanks to some heavy lifting by some Wall Street Big Beast to manipulate the stock price using futures contracts until he’d sold his shares.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/elon-musk-confirms-his-tax-related-selling-sparked-tuesdays-big-tsla-tumble

  6. Like I’ve said many times before, “value” is a nonsense concept. It’s meaningless. What exists is price on on a bill of sale. It’s not “value”. It’s what was realised.
    Proved by what happened following a Tweet about what he was considering doing. Knocked 10% off the market offer. He tried to sell all his Tesla stock, what he’d realise wouldn’t differ much from zero. Who’d be a buyer of what Musk was unloading?

  7. It’s hard to see what these people grizzle about anyway. Musk sold his Tesla stock, then someone else would have had to have bought it. So it just changes the subject of grizzle.

  8. Bloke in North Dorset

    Was this part of that Twatter spat he had with a UN guy who reckoned Musk could cure hunger if he sold 10% of his stock?

    Musk said OK if they could provide concrete plans, with metrics, on how it would be done. UN muttered and mumbled about plans and was obviously caught out grandstanding.

    I didn’t see anything after that.

  9. If Bloke on M4 is correct, if Musk exercised options in a same day transaction (buy and sell) then I’m pretty sure that is taxed as income and not capital gains. There’s likely to be some scrambling on the part of the state of California to claim a piece as until recently Musk was a resident of the state, though he has since decamped for Texas where there is no state income tax.

  10. The fall in the share price leaves Elon Musk a lot poorer by a multiple of the tax that he doesn’t have to pay. If tax was 50% then he would have lost twice the tax saving and recouped only half of it by paying less tax. If it’s 31.8% then his tax savings recoup less than one-third of his losses and his net losses after tax are *more than twice the tax* the tax saving.

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