Insider Buying Roundup: Elon Musk Buys Tesla (TSLA) Shares After Earnings Call Backlash

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Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has made amends with investors of his company after a poorly handled earnings call last week sent shares of the electric automaker tumbling. Musk bought 33,000 Tesla shares on Monday in a series of purchases that lifted his indirect ownership of Tesla to just under 33.64 million shares. Despite being a drop in the bucket in terms of his overall share ownership, the purchases cost nearly $10 million.

The purchases also revealed the story of how Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) performed on the stock market on Monday, as they were made at increasingly higher prices throughout the day as the stock continued to rise, partly on the back of those very purchases. The first purchase, of 5,903 shares, was nabbed at an average price of $295.03. By the eighth and final purchase of the day, the average price per share of the transaction had jumped to $302.13, with shares of Tesla gaining 3% on the day.

Elon Musk

Tesla shares have fully recouped the 5% losses they suffered last Thursday over the past two trading days. Those losses were sparked by a bizarre earnings call that day in which Musk shot down two analysts’ questions related to the company’s financial situation as “boring”, “boneheaded”, and “dry”. That left the media to speculate as to whether Musk was cracking under the pressure of meeting Tesla’s own lofty expectations and was himself growing concerned about the company’s financial health.

Musk began damage control the next day, tweeting that the questions were from sell-side analysts trying to push a short thesis, and claiming that he could’ve handled the situation better. Shorts have been pushing hard against Tesla’s bold growth story for years to no avail, and that activity only picked up steam following the earnings call, with nearly a million additional shares being shorted since then, pushing the total to nearly $12 billion being bet against the company.

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On the next page we’ll check out the recent insider buying at two other companies.

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