Musk sells Tesla stock worth $6.9bn after Twitter poll troll

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has sold roughly $6.9 billion worth of Tesla stocks this week in one of the largest-ever stock disposals by a chief executive over a several-day period.

According to a regulatory filing made public on late Friday, the Tesla CEO reported selling 1.2 million shares on Friday, worth more than $1.2 billion, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Those sales came on top of more than $5.6 billion worth of stock sales earlier this week.

Recently, a report said that initial filings in the US showed that Musk had sold 934,091 shares for about $1.1 billion, out of more than 2.1 million options he received as part of a compensation package.

The filings that were posted later on Wednesday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed that Musk sold another 3.58 million shares in Tesla. That sale was valued at about $4 billion.

The world's richest man had earlier posted two of the costliest tweets in the history of Global Inc.

In a tweet announcing the poll over the weekend, Musk said: "Much is made lately of unrealised gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10 per cent of my Tesla stock.

"I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes."

Nearly 58 per cent of Elon Musk's followers who participated in his Twitter poll told him to sell 10 per cent of his stock (worth $24 billion) in the electric car company, ostensibly to pay more tax.