Who Owns Tesla? Top Shareholders and Elon Musk's Stake

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Elon Musk is Tesla’s largest shareholder. As of June 30, 2025, he held more than 500 million Tesla shares, or 15.73% of the company’s equity. The next three largest holders are asset managers: Vanguard Group (7.79%), BlackRock (6.38%) and State Street (3.53%). Those firms mostly hold the shares on behalf of clients who own their index funds and ETFs, so the largest single owner with a direct, personal stake is Musk.

Tesla is a publicly traded company listed under the ticker TSLA. Its shares are spread across individuals, insiders and institutions, with institutional investors holding about 66.20% of shares outstanding.

Elon Musk’s Stake in Tesla

How Many Shares Musk Owns

Musk’s holding of more than 500 million shares translates to 15.73% of Tesla’s equity as of mid-2025. No other individual comes close. Kimbal Musk, the next most prominent insider holder, owns a fraction of 1%.

Owning 15.73% does not give Musk legal control of Tesla in the way a majority owner would have. Tesla has a single class of common stock, so each share carries one vote and Musk’s voting power broadly tracks his economic stake. Board elections, pay packages and major corporate changes still require support from the remaining shareholders, most of whom are institutions and retail investors. His influence comes from the size of the block, his role as CEO and the loyalty of a large retail shareholder base, not from a voting majority. This differs from companies such as Alphabet or Meta, where founders hold special high-vote share classes.

How Musk’s Ownership Built Up and Changed

Tesla was incorporated in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk joined in 2004 as the lead investor in its first major funding round and became chairman of the board. He took over as CEO in 2008, and a 2009 legal settlement allowed him, along with others, to be called a co-founder. His early capital and later investments are the origin of his large equity position. More on that period is in our Tesla company history.

Several events have shaped his stake since then:

• The 2010 IPO. Tesla went public in 2010 under the name Tesla Motors. Selling new shares to the public diluted existing holders, Musk included, but turned his stake into a publicly traded asset. The company changed its name to Tesla, Inc. in 2017.
• Stock splits. Tesla carried out a 5-for-1 split in 2020 and a 3-for-1 split in 2022. A split multiplies everyone’s share count by the same factor, so Musk’s share count rose sharply while his percentage stayed the same. Share counts from before 2022 cannot be compared directly with current ones without adjusting for both splits.
• Stock sales in 2021 and 2022. Musk sold large blocks of Tesla stock in those years, partly to cover taxes on exercised options and partly around his acquisition of Twitter (now X). Those sales reduced his share count.
• Performance-based pay. Musk’s compensation has come largely in stock options tied to market value and operating milestones rather than salary. His 2018 award was struck down by a Delaware court in 2024 in a shareholder lawsuit. Shareholders voted again to approve it that year, and they also approved moving Tesla’s incorporation from Delaware to Texas. Whether such options are counted in his stake changes how large it looks.

Why Sources Report Different Percentages

Musk’s ownership figure can differ from one source to another, sometimes by several percentage points. The difference usually comes from the denominator and from what counts as “owned”:

• Shares outstanding vs. fully diluted. A percentage based only on shares currently outstanding ignores options that have not been exercised. A fully diluted figure adds those options to both Musk’s holdings and the total share count.
• Beneficial ownership rules. In SEC filings, beneficial ownership includes shares a person can acquire within 60 days, such as vested options. That can make a proxy statement figure higher than a count of shares held outright.
• Timing. Holdings come from filings made at different dates, and any sale, option exercise or new share issuance shifts the result.

The 15.73% figure is a snapshot as of June 30, 2025. When you compare it with another number, check the date and the basis the source used.

Tesla’s Largest Institutional Shareholders

After Musk, Tesla’s top holders are the world’s biggest asset managers. Their stakes come mostly from index funds, which buy each company in proportion to its weight in the index they track. Tesla joined the S&P 500 and the S&P 100 on December 21, 2020. Funds tracking those indexes had to buy the stock, and Tesla’s weight in the S&P 500 has kept these managers among its largest holders since then.

Vanguard Group

Vanguard held more than 250 million Tesla shares as of June 30, 2025, worth over $85 billion at the time and equal to 7.79% of shares outstanding. The largest portion sits in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, which holds a cross-section of the entire U.S. market. Vanguard manages more than $10 trillion in assets, and most of its Tesla position is held for the clients who invest in its mutual funds and ETFs.

BlackRock

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, held nearly 206 million Tesla shares as of June 30, 2025, or 6.38% of the total. Like Vanguard, it holds these shares for the investors in its ETFs and mutual funds rather than as a proprietary bet. BlackRock reported a record $12.53 trillion in assets under management as of the second quarter of 2025. Its business model is covered in What Is BlackRock and How Does It Make Money?

State Street Corporation

State Street held the third-largest institutional position, almost 114 million shares as of June 30, 2025. That stake was 3.53% of the total and was worth over $38 billion at the time. State Street reported $5.12 trillion in assets under management as of June 2025.

What “Held on Behalf of Clients” Means

When Vanguard, BlackRock or State Street appears as a top shareholder, the economic owners are the people and institutions invested in their funds. Gains and losses on the Tesla shares flow to those fund investors. The asset manager usually votes the shares at shareholder meetings, although some managers now let certain fund investors direct their own proxy votes. These three firms therefore carry weight in board elections and pay votes even though they do not own the stakes for themselves.

Institutional Ownership Overall

Institutional investors, including mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds and insurers, hold about 66.20% of Tesla’s shares outstanding. Insiders, led by Musk, and individual retail investors hold the rest.

Other Insiders: Kimbal Musk

Kimbal Musk, Elon’s younger brother, owns about 1.46 million Tesla shares, which is less than 1% of the company. He sits on Tesla’s board of directors and has also served on the board of SpaceX. His stake is small next to his brother’s. He is often listed separately because insiders must report their trades to the SEC, which makes their holdings visible.

What Tesla’s Shareholders Own

Tesla designs and sells electric cars, SUVs and trucks, and it has expanded into energy generation and storage systems. It has grown into one of the world’s largest electric vehicle producers. In 2021, the year after it joined the S&P 500, it became the most valuable automaker by market capitalization when it passed $1 trillion.

For the twelve months ending June 30, 2025, Tesla reported revenue of $92.72 billion and gross profit of $16.21 billion. Its market capitalization at that point was $1.07 trillion. That valuation explains why ownership stakes of a few percentage points are worth tens of billions of dollars. As a rough calculation, Vanguard’s 7.79% of a company valued at about $1.07 trillion comes to roughly $83 billion. That is close to the more than $85 billion reported for its stake, and the gap comes from share prices on different days. Because these dollar values move with the stock price, the share counts and percentages are the more stable way to compare holders.

Musk’s Other Companies

Besides Tesla, Musk is CEO of SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company. Earlier, he co-founded the business that became PayPal. His Tesla shares make up a large part of his wealth. Forbes put his net worth at about $420 billion on August 12, 2025, which ranked him as the richest person in the world on that date.

SpaceX is privately held, so it has no market price and is hard to value. A private share sale in December 2023 valued it at $175 billion, the highest valuation for a pre-IPO company at that time. Unlike his Tesla holdings, Musk’s stakes in SpaceX and his other private companies do not appear in public SEC shareholder filings.

FAQs

The Bottom Line

Investors comparing Tesla ownership figures should look past dollar values and check the date and basis behind each percentage, since options, beneficial ownership rules and filing timing all change the result. Musk's 15.73% as of June 30, 2025 makes him the largest direct owner, while Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street vote large blocks held for fund clients. Board and pay decisions still depend on that broad institutional and retail base.