TESLA Inc. CEO Elon Musk sold 583,611 shares Tuesday in the firm for US$528 million, meaning he’s now more than three-quarters of the way to making good on his pledge to sell 10 percent of his stake in the U.S. electric-car maker.

Musk has been offloading Tesla stock since asking his Twitter followers in November whether he should sell some of his stake. He said he would exercise options toward the end of the year and set up a share-trading plan prior to the poll.

Musk has now sold around 13.5 million shares for about US$14.1 billion, regulatory filings show. He’ll need to dispose of some 17 million shares all up to offload 10 percent of his interest in the U.S.-based electric-car giant, assuming his pledge excludes exercisable options.

“I sold enough stock to get to around 10 percent plus the option exercise stuff and I tried to be extremely literal here,” he said in an interview with satirical website Babylon Bee.

Tesla shares have fallen 24 percent since a peak Nov. 4, just prior to Musk’s Twitter poll, to which the majority of answered “yes.”

Musk, 50, is the world’s richest man, atop of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a fortune of US$244.9 billion. He said in a Tweet late Sunday that he would pay more than US$11 billion in taxes this year.

“California used to be the land of opportunity and now it is... becoming more so the land of sort of overregulation, overlitigation, overtaxation,” he said, adding that it is “increasingly difficult to get things done” in California.

(SD-Agencies)