Elon Musk sold roughly $7 billion in Tesla stock this week, and shares had their worst week in more than a year

The world’s richest man asked his Twitter followers last week if he should sell 10% of his 170 million-plus shares, and the answer was yes. After selling about 6.3 million shares this week, Musk would still not be halfway to that goal, and would only be less than a third of the way there if he does not count his Monday sales, which were from options he exercised and made by a predetermined plan in order to pay the taxes on those options.

Tesla stock had its worst week since the markets swooned at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020; three weeks in February and March of last year are the only weeks worse than the one Tesla just had, adjusted for stock splits. Shares declined 15.4% in total on the week, snapping a streak of 11 straight weekly gains.

In the first Form 4 SEC filings released on Friday, Musk disclosed he sold 639,737 shares in the open market on Thursday, in a series of transactions at prices ranging from $1,104.01 down to $1,056.318. On Thursday, the stock had rallied as much as 3.5% to an intraday high of $1,104.97 before reversing course to fall as much as 1.2% to a low of $1,054.68 before closing down 0.4% at $1,063.51.

The weighted average price of the 44 sale transactions recorded in two separate filings was $1,074.343, according to a MarketWatch calculation.

The filings show Musk was the indirect owner of the shares sold, as trustee of the Elon Musk Revocable Trust.

After the weekly sales, the filings say Musk is still indirect owner of 166,285,682 shares, valued at $171.8 billion at current prices. Tesla ended the week with a market capitalization of $1.04 trillion, enough to make it the fifth most valuable U.S. company.

Despite the recent weakness, Tesla’s stock has still soared 41.7% over the past three months while the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.72% has gained 4.8%.