If I had said a few years ago that $Tesla(TSLA.US)$ would one day be worth $266 billion, there would have been many skeptics. I bring that number up because in just eight trading days, the electric vehicle maker lost that much in market cap from its recent all-time high to its low point on Monday. Shares have been struggling recently thanks to CEO Elon Musk's selling of Tesla shares, an overhang that's taking the narrative away from what the bulls would really like to be discussing currently.
Elon Musk has a set of stock options that must be exercised next summer or he will lose them, resulting in a potential tax bill that's estimated to be $15 billion. The outspoken company leader also started a poll on Twitter during the first weekend of this month asking if he should sell 10% of his position. As of Monday, Elon had sold about $8 billion worth of shares, with investors bracing for more sales in the coming days. Before his share sales, other directors and former directors sold hundreds of millions worth of Tesla shares, including Elon's brother Kimbal whose roughly $100 million sale was curiously not part of a pre-arranged sales program.
In the grand scheme of things, some will argue that Elon's Tesla sale this time around (he will have additional sales down the road as more options expire) shouldn't be that significant. Tesla was worth about $1.25 trillion at its peak, so one would normally assume that a sale of this size wouldn't do that much, as Tesla has been trading $25 billion or so worth of shares daily in recent days. Well, the stock's reaction has been rather sharp as I pointed out above, falling from a high over $1,243 to Monday's low below $979. As detailed in a series of tweets compiled below, some major supporters like Gary Black, who has personally owned Tesla shares over the years and has the stock as the largest holding in his $THE FUTURE FUND ACTIVE ETF(FFND.US)$, are a little upset at how Elon is handling his business.
Some will argue that Gary's secondary plan would have had a larger impact than 3-5%, but that's something we'll truly never know. What we do know is that Elon's selling in drips and drabs have helped to send the stock sharply lower, with some very crazy intra-day moves recently. Until Elon completes his selling, nobody is sure whether things will finish up in a day, week, month, etc., which is putting a dark cloud above Tesla right now. Unless Elon Musk was going to forfeit these options and give up several billion dollars, it was really only a matter of time until this process had to occur.
Tesla bulls would rather be talking about a variety of other items, however. Analyst estimates have been on the rise lately, especially on the bottom line, after the company smashed Q3 estimates as I predicted it would. We are now halfway through the final quarter of the year, a period where Tesla is expected to produce its first Model Y vehicles from two new factories, one in the Berlin, Germany area, and another in Austin, Texas. While these new facilities will add several hundred thousand units of new production in the coming quarters, deliveries won't be seen in the current quarter according to management.