By Dhirendra Tripathi

Investing.com – Tesla stock (NASDAQ:) traded 2.3% higher in Wednesday’s premarket trading as Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk exercised all of his options expiring next year, an indication that he is close to meeting his pledge of selling 10% of his stake in the EV-maker if he hasn’t already honored it.

With Tuesday’s option exercise on 1.6 million shares on Tuesday, Musk, already the company’s largest shareholder, has exercised all of the options on 22.8 million shares, which were due to expire in August. The filings show that he sold 934,090 shares to cover taxes. According to the filings, the pre-set 10B5-1 trading plan was complete on Tuesday.

After conducting a Twitter poll on November 7, asking whether Tesla shareholders should be divided into 10% or 10%, this maverick CEO sold Tesla shares in multiple tranches.

While the poll made it look like Musk would be directed by popular opinion – and the voting eventually favored him selling the stake – it was always likely to happen, as he needed money to pay a large tax bill on his newly acquired Tesla stock from the options due to expire, or else give up billions of dollars worth in options.

The latest sale takes Musk’s total to about 15.6 million shares, for around $16.4 billion.

Bloomberg reports that Musk must sell an additional 1.4 million shares in order to fulfill his pledge to offload 10% of his stake. This assumes the pledge does not include exercisable options.

If his exercisable options are factored into his overall ownership, he’ll need to sell even more.

Tesla’s shares dropped 11% after the Musk poll. But that poll was also a time when share prices were at an all-time high. Today’s drawing showed that the company’s share price is up by more than half a percent year-to-date.