OREANDA-NEWS. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold another $1.05 billion  worth of shares in the electric car maker, Reuters reports. Musk has sold large stakes in his company for the third week in a row. Including recent sales, he got rid of a total of 9.2 million Tesla shares, earning about $9.9 billion.

On November 6, Elon Musk conducted a poll on his Twitter account on whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla shares. He explained this by the need to pay taxes and said he would sell the papers if users of the social network approve such actions. A majority of poll participants were in favour of selling the shares. Musk sold his first block of shares on November 8. Following the Twitter poll, Tesla's share price fell by 15% in a week, marking the biggest weekly drop in the company's securities since March 2020.

To deliver on his promise to sell 10% of his Tesla shares, Musk would need to sell a total of about 17 million shares, or about 1.7% of Tesla's issued securities. Thus, he has already gotten rid of more than half of his planned stake for sale (about 7.8 million securities remain).

Despite Musk's ongoing sell-off, Tesla shares gained 4 percent last week to $1109 per share. In all, the electric car maker's capitalisation has risen 52% since the start of the year and doubled over the past 12 months to $1.1 trillion as of November 23.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, with a fortune of more than $300 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. He does not receive a salary in cash or bonuses from the company, and his fortune is based on Tesla stock. Amid rising stock prices at the electric-car maker, Musk has raised $133.9 billion in capital this year, the biggest increase compared with other members of Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.