Overview Of 4 Top Investors In Tesla

Who are the top investors in Tesla? An important question for investors, even if an oft asked one.

CEO Elon Musk is of course widely known to be one of the primary investors — with a roughly 22.5% share of the company’s common stock (going by best estimates according to what’s been publicly revealed).

Who are the other major investors? Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk’s brother, who started investing by scavenging and melting down junk silver — with a roughly 0.10% share of the company’s common stock. JB Straubel, the company’s Chief Technology Officer — with a 0.17% share of the company’s common stock. And the CEO and Chairman of the Investment Committee of private-equity-fund operator Value Equity Partners, Antonio J Gracias — with a 0.18% share of the company’s common stock.

So Elon Musk is still clearly far and away the top investor in the company… as he has been since the company’s inception. Teslarati provides further details, some of which are quite interesting.

With regard to Elon Musk:

Prior to the recent secondary Public offering, he owned about 29.57 million shares. His involvement in the latest offering included 3 major transactions: (1) the exercise of stock options to acquire 5,503,972 shares of Tesla’s common stock, (2) the sale of 2,782,670 shares of TSLA common stock and (3) donating 1,200,000 shares of common stock to charity. If one also adds all of Mr Musk shares plus all shares issuable to Musk if all options vested and exercisable within 60 days after March 31, 2016 were hypothetically exercised, Musk has beneficial ownership of 33,738,794 (33.73 million) shares or 22.5% of Tesla’s common stock.

With regard to Antonio J Gracias:

His duties include overall responsibility for the Firm’s management, operations, and investing. He also sits on the boards of Tesla Motors (a company in which Valor invests), SolarCity and SpaceX.

…In 2013, Mr Gracia was one of the subjects of the Wall Street Journal article “Directors Take Shelter in Trading Plans.” According to the article, “These plans — opaque documents about which little is disclosed to regulators or the public — increasingly are moving beyond the executives for whom they were chiefly devised and finding favor with a different variety of insider: members of boards of directors, including some who run investment funds. Non-executive directors’ [such as Antonio J Gracias] use of so-called 10b5-1 trading plans, which lay out future stock trades at set prices or on set dates, has jumped 55% since 2008, a Wall Street Journal analysis of regulatory filings found. […] Valor set up a 10b5-1 plan in November 2011 and Mr Gracias reported the sale of 927,205 of Valor’s Tesla shares from March 9 through March 20, 2012, regulatory filings show [FORM 4]. In those 11 days, Valor sold $32 million of Tesla stock, more than half its stake. Tesla’s stock price soon got hit.’

There is no requirement to disclose the terms of trading plans. Even their existence often remains hidden. Tesla does report these types of transaction in FORM 4 disclosures.

Looking at the FORM 4 disclosures, aka Statement of Beneficial Ownership, for Antonio J Gracias available on Tesla investor web site, for the past year, I discovered that he received several Non-Qualified Stock Option awards for his work as Director of Tesla: 50,000 with exercise of $261.89 on 6/18/2015, 51,000 with exercise of $250.69 on 6/12/2015. All these options are currently “under water” (below the current stock price) and effectively worthless, until the stock moves above the exercise price.

On 6/2 and 6/3, 2014 Antonio J Gracias sold about $3 million of TSLA stock owned through his Trust and the AIJ Growth Fund. As of May 15, 2016, Antonio Gracias held 254,647 shares of Tesla, which were worth approximately $56.5 million, and represent about 0.18% of Tesla’s common stock.

With regard to JB Straubel:

Looking at the FORM 4 filings of the last couple of years for Jeffrey B Straubel, two things are interesting to note. First on 4/11/2016 he was awarded 1,837 ISOs (Incentive Stock Options) and 61, 771 NSOs (Non-qualified Stock Options), at an exercise price of $249.92. As with Antonio Gracias, these options are underwater, and worthless at the moment, given the current stock price.

Secondly, between May 2015 and December 2015, Jeffrey B Straubel, set up pre-determined Rule 10b5-1 Trading Plan, where he would exercise and sell about 10,000 options in almost every month, on the 15th of the month. Accordingly, he exercised and sold 75,000 shares of stock, at prices between $206 and $263, for a total profit of about $17.8 million. Not too shabby for the tech guy. As of May 15, 2016, Jeffrey B Straubel held 242,818 shares of Tesla, which are worth approximately $53.90 million, and represent about 0.17% of Tesla’s common stock.