Tesla (TSLA) insider trading: Elon’s friend James Murdoch just unloaded $13 million

James Murdoch, a Tesla board member and friend of CEO Elon Musk, has confirmed that he sold about $13 million in stock today as the stock (TSLA) crashed.

There has been a lot of insider trading at Tesla lately, and by trading, we mean selling – cause no insider is ever buying at Tesla.

We recently reported on Kimball Musk, Elon’s brother, and Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer Taneja Vaibhav recently selling ahead of a recent drop in the company’s stock price.

Tesla’s chairwoman, Robyn Denholm, also sold $33 million worth of Tesla shares last week and over $100 million in the last 3 months.

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Now, it’s James Murdoch’s turn. The Tesla board member just confirmed, through a required SEC filing, that he sold 54,776 Tesla shares for just over $13 million today:

He sold as Tesla’s stock crashed 15% today. It is now down more than 50% from its all-time high just a few months ago.

Murdoch was appointed to Tesla’s board in 2017.

He is better known as the son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the former CEO of 21st Century Fox from 2015 to 2019.

Murdoch was one of the Tesla board directors who was forced to return almost $1 billion in cash and stock options to Tesla as part of a settlement for over-compensation.

Electrek’s Take

Tesla insiders are unloading, and those are just the ones we know about. Public companies only have to report insider trading for board directors and listed top executives.

For the latter, Tesla purposefully only lists 3 people: Elon, Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s CFO, and Tom Zhu, whose role at Tesla has bit quite fluid in recent years.

Therefore, we don’t know about the dozens of other top executives potentially selling their shares right now amid a giant correction.

It’s really suspicious because there are clear top leaders at Tesla who are often on Tesla’s earnings calls, and they are not even listed, like Lars Moravy, for example.

But it’s par for the course at Tesla, which has some of the worst corporate governance I have ever seen. It’s truly shameful.