Last week, Drew Baglino abruptly quit Tesla after 18 years at the electric car company, departing from his role as Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy Engineering.
It hasn't taken the 43-year-old long to sever all ties with Elon Musk's company.
Today he filed to sell 1,141,362 shares of the company valued at $181 million.
Here is what he wrote when he departed in tandem with a round of layoffs that included 10% of all staff:
I made the difficult decision to move on from Tesla after 18 years yesterday. I am so thankful to have worked with and learned from the countless incredibly talented people at Tesla over the years. I loved tackling nearly every problem we solved as a team and feel gratified to have contributed to the mission of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, a mission that I am quite passionate about. I will always have a warm spot for the people of Tesla and Tesla products in my heart and wish the team and company the best in the future. When I joined as a junior firmware / electrical engineer back in 2006, a future Tesla that produced the world’s top selling vehicle was well beyond my expected set of outcomes. A reminder to all of us to set higher expectations, I guess :)
The shares he sold appear to be the final round of stock options he was entitled to receive. He had previously only held around $5m worth of shares.
The filing gives him 90 days to sell the stock but in a company as large and liquid as Tesla, the shares are typically sold immediately. For instance, his 1.1 million shares would have easily been absorbed by the 126 million in volume today.
He had previously sold 10,500 shares worth $1.85m on April 1 immediately after receiving stock options priced at $17.22 and has made consistent monthly sales of shares for years after receiving them, so perhaps it's not a reflection of anything going on at the company and just a personal preference. Still, this dwarfs all his previous sales.
Or he could be following the lead of Musk, who has made nearly 400 separate sales of TSLA shares in the past two years ranging from $4 million and ranging up to $595 million.
What's also notable about TSLA stock is that there has been virtually zero insider buying of shares despite a more than 50% drop in the stock over the past two years.
