Elon Musk sold $22-million in Tesla stock this week, gaining a reported $3.58-billion, even though he previously stated that he wasn’t going to keep doing so, and this seems to have upset one of the company’s major shareholders. In fact, Tesla’s third largest individual shareholder, Leo Koguan, (whose 22.7-million shares add up to almost $3.6-billion) believes that this is indication Elon has actually given up on Tesla and that he should be replaced as the company’s CEO.
Koguan used to have a very positive opinion of Musk (he was even called a “fanboy” at one point), which he expressed publicly on a number of occasions, but now it seems the Tesla CEO has fallen out of favor. In 2020, he says his sold most of his stock holdings, and bought more Tesla call options, claiming that this makes him the single biggest Tesla investor.
Just before the news broke that Elon was unloading more Tesla shares earlier this week, Koguan tweeted that
Today, I just put in another $500 million on the line to support Tesla stock price @$160 whereas Elon sold $35B his shares and maybe more last few days. Why he mocked me to be his fanboy who has supported him and Tesla since 2019 with $billions?
Now he is directly calling for the Tesla founder to be removed as CEO and someone new to be appointed, since in his view he has abandoned the company (which he believes is currently without an active CEO). He tweeted that
Elon abandoned Tesla and Tesla has no working CEO. Tesla needs and deserves to have working full time CEO.
Selling large chunks of his Tesla stock recently has made Elon quite unpopular among Tesla investors, especially since he finalized the takeover of Twitter. Some have speculated that the Tesla CEO sold so many shares specifically to fund buying Twitter, which he did for a reported $44-billion, even though he changed his mind halfway through the purchase when it was discovered exactly how many fake bot accounts were registered on the platform.
