Tesla senior vice president who resigned last week asks to sell all $181 million of his TSLA stock

Last week, Drew Baglino abruptly left Tesla after 18 years at the electric car maker, leaving his position as senior vice president of powertrain engineering and energy.

It didn’t take long for the 43-year-old to cut all ties with Elon Musk’s company.

Today, he filed to sell 1,141,362 shares of the company’s stock valued at $181 million.

Here’s what he wrote when he left alongside a series of layoffs that affected 10% of the entire staff:

I made the difficult decision yesterday to leave Tesla after 18 years. I am very grateful to have worked with and learned from the countless incredibly talented people at Tesla over the years. I loved tackling almost every problem we solved as a team and feel happy to have contributed to the mission of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, a mission I am very passionate about. I will always have a warm place in my heart for the people of Tesla and Tesla products and I wish the team and the company the best for the future. When I joined the company as a junior firmware/electrical engineer in 2006, a future Tesla that would produce the world’s best-selling vehicle far exceeded my expectations. A reminder to all of us to set higher expectations, I guess 🙂

The shares he sold appear to be the last set of stock options he was entitled to receive. He previously only owned about $5 million in stock.

The filing gives it 90 days to sell the shares, but in a company as large and liquid as Tesla, shares are typically sold immediately. For example, its 1.1 million shares would have easily been absorbed by the 126 million in volume today.

He had already sold 10,500 shares worth $1.85 million on April 1 immediately after receiving stock options priced at $17.22 and achieved consistent monthly sales of shares for years after receiving them. Personal preference. Yet this eclipses all of its previous sales.

Or he could follow the example of Musk, who made nearly 400 distinct sales of TSLA stock over the past two years ranging from $4 million to $595 million.

What’s also notable about TSLA stock is that there has been virtually no insider purchasing of the stock despite the stock falling more than 50% over the past two years.