Elon Musk bought $25m of Tesla stock last week

Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted on Monday that he purchased $25m of the electric car-maker’s stock in a public offering last week.

The manufacturer offered 3,086,419 shares last week at $243 each with Musk revealing that he had made off with around 102,880 of the total for $25m through a trust controlled by him.

Originally, the firm had said that its founder would participate via the purchase of $10.0m in ordinary shares.

Through the offering, on top of a convertible bond issue, Tesla raised approximately $2.35bn, with $748m coming from the share sale and the remainder from the sale of debt, including the underwriters' exercise of options to buy more shares and bonds, the company said in a statement.

During the preceding week, Tesla had disclosed a higher-than-expected first quarter loss of about $702m on a GAAP basis, leading Musk to walk back on the multiple pledges made throughout 2018 that the launch of the Model 3 would eliminate the need for the company to have to go cap in hand to investors again.

One year before, Tesla had reported a GAAP net loss of $710m.

In particular, a record decline in deliveries and a repayment of $920m of convertible notes saw the company's cash position reduced from $3.7bn to $2.2bn.

Musk revealed his 2 May share purchase in a filing made with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. He now owns 33,927,560 Tesla shares through the trust.

It was Musk’s first purchase of Tesla stock (ticker: TSLA) of 2019 with the purchases having been conducted at a lower price than in the year before.