Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is expected to sell 10 per cent of his stock in the electric vehicle company after polling his millions of Twitter followers about a potential sale.
The unofficial poll of Mr Musk’s Twitter fans came as some US Democrats push for billionaires to pay taxes when the price of the stocks they hold goes up, even if they don’t sell any shares.
It’s a concept called “unrealised gains”, and Mr Musk is sitting on a lot of them with a net worth of roughly $US300 billion ($A402 billion).
“Much is made lately of unrealised gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10 per cent of my Tesla stock,” Musk tweeted on Saturday afternoon (US time).
“Do you support this?”
There have been 3,519,252 votes in the poll, with just hours remaining. Of those, 57.9 per cent voted in favour of Mr Musk’s proposal.
Tweet from @elonmusk
Tweet from @elonmusk
Much of Mr Musk’s wealth is held in shares of Tesla, which does not pay him a cash salary.
“I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock,” he tweeted.
Mr Musk, who is known for his sometimes flippant tweets, said he would “abide by the results of this poll”.
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