Elon Musk buys $10 million worth of Tesla (TSLA) shares, on top of another $20M direct from the company

Tesla confirmed early today that CEO (or ‘nothing‘) Elon Musk bought $10 million worth of TSLA shares.

The transaction is in addition to another $20M worth of shares that he plans to purchase directly from the company.

As we reported earlier this month, Musk announced that he is buying $20 million worth of Tesla shares – seemingly to compensate for the SEC settlement fine.

The SEC fined Musk and Tesla $20 million each.

When buying Tesla shares, Musk generally does it on the open market, but the company confirmed that he planned to buy them directly from Tesla, which made it look like he wanted to at least partly compensate the company for the fine – though he is getting shares in return.

Now, Tesla revealed in a new SEC filing today that Musk bought an additional 29,844 shares worth almost $10 million:

In the filing, Tesla confirmed that those purchases on the market are separate from the $20 million worth of shares that Musk planned to buy from Tesla:

“The transactions reported on this Form 4 are open market purchases of Tesla Common Stock on October 29, 2018 by Elon Musk, totaling $9,997,264.14. As previously announced, Mr. Musk has also committed to purchase an additional ~$20 million of Common Stock in a direct transaction with Tesla, which is expected to close by next week.”

At now 33,767,765 shares, Musk’s stake in Tesla is worth $11.3 billion as of the market’s close yesterday.

The new purchase comes as Tesla has surged following higher than expected earnings during the third quarter.

Here’s the filing in full:

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Electrek’s Take

While those amounts are relatively small purchases compared to Musk’s stake in the company, executives buying into their own stock is generally seen as a good sign by the market.

In this case, it comes after an important surge in pricing and it could mean that Musk thinks that the stock should have surged higher after the earnings.

Musk has been talking about burning the shorts for a while now, but it has instead been a back and forth battle as Tesla’s stock took an important hit following the attempt to go private.

But now that they reported their most important profit to date, the short thesis is starting to fall apart.

It doesn’t mean that it is smooth sailing from here on out. There are still plenty of mistakes that Tesla can make, but it certainly looks like the “eating glass” part is done.