Tesla Chair Sells $35 Million of Stock

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 20, 6:20AM EST

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Tesla Chair Sells $35 Million of Stock — © Marco_Bonfanti / iStock via Getty Images

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The Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) chair of the board of directors has sold about $35 million worth of the stock.
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Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) Chair Robyn Denholm sold about $35 million in stock after the presidential election as the value of the shares rose. An SEC Form 4 filing shows that the shares were sold in 12 trades on November 15. The expiration date of the underlying options was June 18, 2025. The number of options exercised was 112,390.

The sale was not made because of the rapid rise in the stock. It was part of an automatic share sales plan set in place in June. Such plans are not unusual and allow executives and board members to sell in a way that shows the sales were not made based on insider information. Once the transactions were finished, Denholm netted $32.5 million.

Denholm became board chair in November 2018, taking over from CEO Elon Musk. At the time, TechCrunch wrote, “Musk’s resignation was part of a settlement with the SEC, which found Tesla guilty of failing to require disclosure controls and procedures relating to a tweet from Musk about taking the company private.”

As of Tesla’s last proxy, she had 1,662,480 shares of underlying options outstanding. That means she is extremely rich.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.