Elon Musk probably got a huge tax break when he sold off Tesla shares
CNN
To buy Twitter, Elon Musk just sold a ton of stock and made a boatload of money on the sale. But because of a US tax law quirk, Musk's stock sale could give him an enormous tax break.
Musk last month sold $8.5 billion worth of Tesla shares for more than 100 times what he paid for them (he exercised options and bought them for a massively reduced price). But the IRS doesn't care what Musk initially paid for the stock; it cares only what the shares were worth when he bought and sold them.
Tesla's stock was going for more than $1,000 a share when Musk bought 22.9 million shares late last year, but by the time he sold the 9.6 million shares last week, the price had fallen, and he received only $883 a share, on average. That difference comes to about $1.7 billion.
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