Tesla CEO Elon Musk now owns a 20.5% stake in the company, according to a new SEC filing, meaning the world’s richest person is close to his demand for 25% voting control of the EV maker.
Musk’s stake in Tesla — which was previously reduced to 13% after he sold tens of millions of shares in 2022 partly to finance his acquisition of Twitter, now X — is made up of 411.06 million shares of Tesla common stock, and options to purchase 303.96 million shares of common stock exercisable within 60 days of December 31, according to the filing Wednesday.
In January, Musk posted on X he was “uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control,” which he added was “Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned.”
Musk, who also co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before leaving in 2018, said unless he got his desired stake, “I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla.”
In April 2022, Musk said an “interesting prototype” of a robot he was developing called Tesla Optimus would be ready that year, and production of the robot, which would perform house chores, would start within two years. In July, Musk said Tesla was investing up to $1 billion in Project Dojo, a supercomputer with machine learning features to store and manage data generated by its millions of Teslas around the world.
But a larger stake for Musk would also give the billionaire a larger payout. A Delaware state court judge late last month struck down Musk’s $55 billion Tesla CEO pay package from 2018 that cemented his place as the world’s richest person. Musk has moved to reincorporate both Tesla and SpaceX in Texas in response.
Tesla stock, which has struggled mightily to start 2024 on its way to the bottom of the S&P 500, was up 4.7% Thursday afternoon.