Do you know Bitcoin Pizza Day? This unofficial one celebrates the time a programmer bought two pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoin. In 2010 that was $41, but today the crypto is worth almost $400 million. In the same genre, this story of a Tesla employee who was forced to sell his shares and lost out on almost 50 million dollars.
The guests of the podcast Iced Coffee Hour interview Carl Medlock. He started working at Tesla in 2009 and earned 40 percent, but was given 20,000 stock options. A nice bonus, but nothing shocking; the price at the time was $0.90 per share. But due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, he did not become rich from it.
Sold the shares to pay a lawyer
Medlock apparently ended up in a divorce with his then wife in 2013 and apparently a lawyer had to be involved to divide all the belongings. There seems to be another step missing in the 'one thing led to another', but the lawyer managed to convince a judge that the couple had to sell the Tesla shares to pay his salary.
Medlock and his ex-wife received about $60,000 for the shares. If we calculate it back, we are still missing some information, but according to the former Tesla employee, the shares would have been worth around $50 million in 2022. You do not have to convert this amount into euros to understand that the best man has lost a lot of money due to this divorce.
No case against the lawyer
He investigated whether he could sue the lawyer and get (part of) the money back, but apparently this was a moot point. Medlock now runs his own business where he repairs Teslas. He says he now still has some shares in manufacturers such as Rivian and Lucid, although we do not suspect that they will go through the roof as fast as Tesla.
Looking back, it's always a nice place to live, because Medlock may have already sold his shares when they were worth 1 million. He also sees the positive side of the story: if his life had turned out differently, he would not have met all the people he knows now. If he had become filthy rich, he would have flown to his private island in a helicopter and no one would have ever seen him again, he believes.
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