I read this article and still walked away feeling like I didn’t understand the situation that well.
Is it $56 billion that he’s already been paid, and he needs to return it? $56 billion he’s partially been paid, and he can keep what he has, but won’t get the rest? Something more complicated?
It’s Elon. There are a wealth of possible reasons, ranging from actually reasonable to ‘it sounded better in my head’. Elon can be kinda erratic in his judgement sometimes.
One possibility is that he may have been attempting his usual market manipulation shenanigans; he is quite blatant about using his cult of personality for this. Wherever he publicly goes in the market, he is followed by millions of worshipping fanboys. They raise the price, he executes, pretty much instant profit right there.
He could also be thinking the price would plummet below the contract price (or that he could make it do so then raise it again).
Or maybe he didn’t like the fact that he’d have to hold them for 5 years before being able to do what he wanted with. Elon is not known to simply abide by trading regulations.
Maybe he wanted a tax write off?
Or he could have simply forgot.
The only real benefit to Elon is that he didn’t have to pay out for shares he was no longer interested in buying, even if he did make a bit of a loss with the options.
Thanks for the speculation. It still seems a bit odd, especially considering he’s asked the board to give him a 25% stake in the company recently.
I wonder if he did anything like back loans with those options, and if he did, what the consequences would be now that he’s not going to have them anymore?