Tesla CEO Elon Musk got $15.5M from IPO (Silicon Valley)

Recently lamenting in a divorce filing about having to stay with friends to make ends meet, Tesla Motors Inc. CEO Elon Musk sold about $15.5 million in shares in his company's initial public offering this week.

Musk sold 909,212 shares as part of a group of insiders who sold about 1.4 million in shares as part of the IPO. After the IPO, Musk still owns about 27 million shares worth about $645 million at Tuesday's closing price.

The insider shares and the 11.9 million shares sold by the company at $17 a share came before the remarkable 41 percent run-up recorded by Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) on its first day of trading, a day when the Nasdaq dropped by about 4 percent.

Tesla closed trading on Tuesday at $23.89, meaning Musk could have made another $6.3 million if he sold at that price.

Many of the company's big pre-IPO shareholders held onto all of their shares, including Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Menlo Park venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Daimler AG, Aabar Investments of Abu Dhabi and Chicago-based Valor Equity Partners.

Read the full story and a rundown of how other investors made out in the IPO in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.