Because as soon as he starts selling them, they'll devaluate immensely

Because he can afford not to, for now.

I think they don't have to pay the same amount of taxes if they use the stock as collateral for getting loans

Chances are there are some considerations which I don't know about

That's not how it works. You can't sell without someone buying from you, and if you're selling everything then buyers will know your stock is worthless and will not exactly be rushing to take you up on the offer, except at whatever severely depressed prices will generate a profit margin from liquidating your assets.

He's much better off propping up the stock with a bit more grifting for as long as that will last and living off loans taken with stocks as the collateral.

One cannot simply sell all of their stock if they own that much.

I don’t think Elon cares about Tesla as a vision anymore, but does he care about being “the richest man in the world” or at least one of them. Absolutely, and TSLA is the reason that’s true.

IIRC, he borrowed against them for a lot of stuff, including the Twitter acquisition. It's probably why he's freaking out a bit and returning to it. It's also not the first time he's had liquidity problems. Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. The infamous "refundable deposit" for the car back then that ended up being almost twice as much as promised was essentially an unsecured loan. People were almost out all their money.

Bethany McLean (a journalist that was among the first to start questioning Enron's numbers and wrote the book "the smartest men in the room" on it that also became a documentary) has been following Elon Musk for well over a decade.

She once said "Whenever Elon is lashing out is when he's under enormous stress". Also, he has a large cult of true believers who believe a man who's taken credit for others work as his own all his life. Watch this documentary called "the cult of the dead stock" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Bd6YxifCo ; it's like that x100.

> Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse.

Yet another thing Tesla should have faced sanctions on - you'd never have known this by listening to any earnings call or looking at any financial filings from Tesla at that time (and at one point I think the number was <10 days).

I really do wonder if outright financial fraud was occurring. There was a period of time where they were going through CFOs like water over Niagara Falls (whom I assume were refusing to sign off on the books?).

First of all, there has been a significant selloff by Tesla top executives, including over $10 billion by Musk in the past 3 years [1,2,3]. The main reason he can’t sell of more is that he is still fighting in court to get his insane $56 billion executive bonus, which would be primarily in Tesla stock [4]. I say insane because it is over 500 times larger than any bonus given by any other company ever and is equivalent to giving every other Tesla employee an almost half a million-dollar bonus. I think we will see a lot more sell offs once the outcome of that legal battle is done, whether it comes out positive or negative for Musk.

More broadly, I think Tesla’s general valuation is a house of cards that his been hyper inflated by years of Musk lying to investors about future sales, future products, and future features. He promised a million driverless taxi’s that would make $30,000 profit each year would be coming “next year” in 2019 [5], that full self driving was coming in an update “next month” in 2020 [6] and wildly incorrect capabilities of basically every product ever released.

[1] “four top officers at the company have offloaded over $100 million in shares since early February [2025]… Elon Musk's brother, Kimbal Musk, who also sits on the board, unloaded 75,000 shares worth approximately $27 million last month” https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tesla-board-members-executiv...

[2] “Musk sold a total of 41.5 million shares of Tesla stock between November 4 and December 12 [2024]… The sales came not long after a October 19, 2022 earning call in which he told investors ‘I can’t emphasize enough, we have excellent demand for Q4.’… But when Tesla reported fourth-quarter sales, they were far weaker than forecast, and that sent stocks down 12%, the worst day of trading for the stock in more than two years.” https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/04/business/musk-tesla-stock-sal...

[3] “Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Thursday he does not plan to sell any more shares of Tesla for at least the next two years, after the billionaire and nascent Twitter owner offloaded nearly $3.6 billion worth of stock this week [2022] as Tesla's share price tumbled.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/12/22/musk...

[4] https://www.investopedia.com/elon-musks-multi-billion-dollar...

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/22/tech/tesla-robotaxis/index.ht...

[6] https://www.whichcar.com.au/news/tesla-level-five-absurd-say...