Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA) Alert: Elon Musk Buys over $20 Million Worth of Shares

By Carly Forster

Tesla Motors Inc TSLA founder and chief executive Elon Musk purchased 82,645 common shares of the electric car company August 19 in a discretionary buy transaction for $242 per share, worth a total of $20,000,090. Musk now owns 28,371,342 shares of Tesla following the transaction.

Unfortunately for Elon Musk, however, shares of Tesla have dropped over 15% since he purchased the shares. With that said, Tesla is not the only stock that has dropped recently as the Dow fell by 500 points over the weekend due to China's faltering stock market and concerns that the Fed will raise interest rates.

Musk's large stock purchase can be assumed to be stemmed from his confidence in the electric vehicle company's future. While Tesla lowered its delivery outlook for the Model S and Model X in 2015 from 55,000 to between 50,000 and 55,000, the company still has a lot to look forward to, such as the idea of creating an app-based, on-demand mobility service for self-driving cars, next year's release of a prototype for Tesla's modestly priced Everyman model, advances in the construction of Tesla's $5 billion Gigafactory battery facility in Nevada, and the expansion of Tesla's emerging energy storage business.

The purchase also came just two days after Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas reiterated an Outperform rating on Tesla and increased his price target from $280 to $465, marking a 66% increase. Adam Jonas has rated Tesla a total of 32 times, earning a 63% success rate recommending the company and a +37.8% average return per recommendation when measured over a one-year horizon and no benchmark.

Out of 33,618 corporate insiders tracked by TipRanks, Elon Musk is ranked #30, earning a 70% successful transaction rate and a +190.8% average return per transaction when measured over a one-year horizon.

Additionally, TipRanks recently uncovered patterns in insider trading in which investors can earn 5.45% in monthly returns over no benchmark or 4% in monthly returns measured over the S&P 500 by imitating buy transactions performed by top-ranked Insiders. TipRanks back-tested the results 50 months, proving that 38 out of the 50 months, or 76%, were profitable to varying degrees.