In This Article:
Yahoo Finance’s Pras Subramanian details what’s to come after Tesla’s tough week and Rivian’s public debut.
Video Transcript
ZACK GUZMAN: I want to turn our attention though to a different story playing out here in the EV space. Of course, we've seen Tesla shares under pressure ever since CEO Elon Musk weighed in on Twitter about selling shares, leaving that question up to his Twitter followers in a Twitter poll, shedding about $5 billion now as you look at how much he's sold the stock. Stock's come back though since that's happened.
That's all been playing out, plus we got Rivian to check in on after the biggest IPO that we've seen since 2014, as that electric truck maker made its debut yesterday, closing north of $100 a share. For more on all the auto action, want to bring I'm Yahoo Finance's auto expert, Pras Subramanian joins us here. And I guess we can start with Elon Musk and Tesla just because that's the big one. A lot of our viewers watch and the stock bouncing back. Shrug it off, I guess a well choreographed, dare I say, move from Elon Musk.
PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, Zack, shrugging off that move, popping a little bit today after, yes, a choreographed move. You know, Musk revealed that he sold around $5 billion worth of shares in a filing last night. Likely going to complete this 10% stock sale over the next few days. We'll see.
He might have something like a $10 billion tax bill for these obligations, tax obligations itself for exercising some options that he got. Interesting that the sale was quote automatically affected back in mid-September, so a month or two before his well-publicized poll as to whether he should sell stock based on citing unrealized tax gains and tax avoidance things like that.
But you know don't cry too hard for Musk, right? You know so he might have lost some money this way because of his personal fortune kind of losing maybe $50 billion bucks. But you know for the year, Tesla shares, his fortune is up 70% for this year alone, based on Tesla's stock performance this year plus his stake in SpaceX.
ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I'm not-- I'm not really crying over this one here, Pras. But there's a lot of people applauding what they saw out of Rivian yesterday. We talk so much about kind of that company and what it's been able to attract as I said closing above the $100 price level here in its debut after pricing shares at $78.
So quite a pop there and continuing to see some nice gains today, up almost 20%. What do you make of that in terms of, you know, we talked about a lot of the enthusiasm maybe potentially going too far for an early entrant like Rivian. But holding the gain so far today.