Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s trust sold about $1.2 billion in Tesla stock on Friday, according to financial filings posted Friday evening. He still holds more than 166 million shares in the company.

Musk sold about $6.9 billion worth of stock in the company over the course of the week. Some of the shares were sold in part to satisfy tax obligations related to an exercise of stock options.

Those sales impacted the company’s share price. Tesla stock declined 15.4% for the week, marking the company’s worst one-week performance in 20 months. It was also the worst week for Tesla stock ever, excluding declines in February and March 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic sent markets tumbling.

Tesla shares are still up around 46% year to date following a record closing price of $1,229.91 on Nov. 4, 2021.

On Nov. 6, Musk asked his more than 60 million Twitter followers to vote in an informal poll and told them their vote would determine the future of his Tesla holdings. Financial documents filed during the week show that some were slated for sale this week no matter the outcome of the poll, however.

Previously, Musk signaled that he was likely to sell “a huge block” of his options in the fourth quarter. At an appearance at the Code Conference in September, Musk said when his stock options expire at Tesla, his marginal tax rate would be over 50%.

—CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said high production and break-even cash flow will be the true test for rival carmaker Rivian, which had a blockbuster IPO on Wednesday and now has a market value of over $100 billion.

“There have been hundreds of automotive startups, both electric and combustion, but Tesla is [the] only American carmaker to reach high volume production & positive cash flow in past 100 years,” Musk said in a tweet Thursday.

He added: “I hope they’re [Rivian] able to achieve high production and breakeven cash flow. That is the true test.”

Rivian, which did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment on Musk’s tweets, has never recorded revenue and it expects less than $1 million in sales in the third quarter.

It says it has 55,400 pre-orders for its R1S SUV and R1T pickup truck and a contract to build 100,000 electric vans with Amazon by 2030.

But trusting Rivian to assemble the vehicles and deliver them profitably represents a massive gamble for investors who are already valuing the company higher than traditional auto giants Ford and General Motors.

Despite the lack of revenue, Rivian raised around $12 billion in its market debut, making the IPO the largest in the world this year. The IPO also made Rivian the second most valuable car manufacturer in the U.S. behind Tesla.

After its first two days of trading in 2010, Tesla had a market cap of just over $2 billion. Meanwhile, R.J. Scaringe, the CEO of Rivian, was worth that much on his own after his company’s second day on the public market.

Rivian shares popped 57% in their first two days on the Nasdaq. Scaringe, who founded Rivian in 2009, owns 17.6 million shares, valued at $2.2 billion, based on Thursday’s closing stock price of $122.99.

“We began thinking about the truck, SUV, and crossover segments as they presented a massive opportunity for us to demonstrate how a clean sheet, technology-focused vehicle could eliminate long accepted compromises,” Scaringe wrote in the company’s IPO prospectus.

“We wanted to establish our brand by delivering a combination of efficiency, on-road performance, off-road capability, functional utility, and product refinement that simply didn’t exist in the market.”

Rivian has poached numerous former Tesla employees, including key engineers that helped to build the Tesla Model 3.

It’s not the first time Musk has thrown shade at Rivian. Last month he tweeted “prototypes are trivial compared to scaling production and supply chain.” 

— Additional reporting by Ari Levy.

Shares of Tesla declined 15.4% for the week after CEO Elon Musk commenced with his plans to sell a huge block of his holdings this week.

It marks Tesla’s worst one-week performance in 20 months. It’s also the stock’s worst week ever excluding declines that occurred in February and March 2020 — as the coronavirus pandemic emerged in the U.S., roiling markets.

Tesla closed down 2.8% on Friday.

Musk — who still owns more than 167 million shares of Tesla, according to financial filings out Friday morning — sold stock worth around $5.7 billion this week.

Musk sold shares in part to satisfy tax obligations related to an exercise of stock options. Before his sale plan was made public, Musk asked his 62.5 million Twitter followers to vote in an informal poll, telling them their vote would determine the future of his Tesla holdings. This week’s filings reveal he knew some of his shares were slated for sale this week.

Tesla shares are still up around 46% year to date following a record closing price of $1,229.91 on Nov. 4, 2021.

By comparison, Ford shares are up around 120%, General Motors shares are up around 51% and Volkswagen AG shares have risen around 66% year-to-date.

The slump in Tesla’s stock price followed a sell-off, and coincided with a record-breaking IPO in autos for Rivian, a newer maker of fully electric pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles.

Shares of Rivian closed rose 5.6% on Friday. It’s up around 66.6% since its debut on Wednesday.

Rivian raised around $12 billion in its market debut Wednesday, making its IPO the largest in the world this year so far. Rivian now ranks the second most valuable car manufacturer in the U.S. behind Tesla, though it expects to record less than $1 million in sales for the third quarter.

In financial filings, Rivian said that it has 55,400 preorders for its R1S SUV and R1T pickup truck, plus a contract to build 100,000 electric delivery vans for Amazon by 2030.

Musk responded to Rivian’s IPO success on Twitter saying:

“I hope they’re able to achieve high production & breakeven cash flow. That is the true test. There have been hundreds of automotive startups, both electric & combustion, but Tesla is only American carmaker to reach high volume production & positive cash flow in past 100 years.”

After its first two days of trading in 2010, electric vehicle maker Tesla had a market cap of just over $2 billion.

R.J. Scaringe, the CEO of EV manufacturer Rivian, is worth that much on his own after his company’s second day on the public market.

Rivian shares popped 57% in their first two days on the Nasdaq, giving the company a market cap of almost $105 billion. Scaringe, who founded Rivian in 2009, owns 17.6 million shares, valued at $2.2 billion, based on Thursday’s closing stock price of $122.99.

Scaringe, 38, lured investors to his vision for an EV company that will sell to both consumers who want to go electric, and companies that are trying to drastically reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. In his letter to shareholders in the IPO prospectus, Scaringe said that in 2012 he moved away from an effort to build an “efficient sports car” and started focusing on how to “maximize impact.”

“We began thinking about the truck, SUV, and crossover segments as they presented a massive opportunity for us to demonstrate how a clean sheet, technology-focused vehicle could eliminate long accepted compromises,” Scaringe wrote. “We wanted to establish our brand by delivering a combination of efficiency, on-road performance, off-road capability, functional utility, and product refinement that simply didn’t exist in the market.”

The company says it has 55,400 pre-orders for its R1S SUV and R1T pickup truck and a contract to build 100,000 electric vans with Amazon by 2030. However, trusting Rivian to assemble the vehicles and deliverthem profitably represents a massive gamble for investors who are already valuing the company higher than traditional auto giants Ford and General Motors. The company has never recorded revenue and expects less than $1 million in sales in Q3.

But business fundamentals aren’t driving the current run-up in EV stocks.

Since Tesla’s relatively tepid IPO in 2010, the EV market has turned into a haven for speculators, with Tesla serving as the catalyst. On a split-adjusted basis, Tesla went public at $3.40 a share. It closed on Thursday at $1,063.51 and is one of only five U.S. companies valued at over $1 trillion.

Others in the space have skyrocketed of late, with China’s Nio valued at $69 billion and California’s Lucid Motors worth about $73 billion four months after hitting the public market.

Nio reported third-quarter revenue of about $1.5 billion and an operating loss of over $150 million.

Lucid just confirmed last month the first customer deliveries of its $169,000 Air Dream Edition sedan were set to begin. In its presentation to to investors, the company projected full-year revenue of $97 million.

Tesla is the only one of the group that’s turned into a profitable high-growth business, but it’s still a car company that trades like a software maker. Much of the hype is tied to boisterous CEO Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, with a net worth of close to $300 billion, mostly tied to his Tesla holdings.

Scaringe, who has a PhD in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is far from Musk’s financial mark. But he has created a similar ownership structure that gives him outsized authority.

Rivian, which is based in Irvine, California, has two classes of stock. Scaringe owns just 1% of Class A shares, or those held by the broader investor base and available for trading. But he owns 100% of Class B shares, and each one has 10 times the amount of voting control as a Class A share.

Add it all up, and Scaringe, who is also chairman of the board, has 9.5% voting control. His veto power is even greater. That’s because in order to make any major changes at the board level or in the company’s bylaws, the holders of at least 80% of Class B shares would have to go along with the move.

In addition to his hefty equity holdings, Scaringe has the opportunity to dramatically increase his wealth if the company performs well. In January, the board approved an equity award of 6.8 million shares that’s time based and an award of 20.4 million shares, which vest in 12 installments based on where the stock is trading.

The company acknowledges in its prospectus that a bet on Rivian is a bet on Scaringe.

“We are highly dependent on the services and reputation of Robert J. Scaringe, our Founder and Chief Executive Officer,” the company says, in the risk factors section of the filing. “Dr. Scaringe is a significant influence on and driver of our business plan. If Dr. Scaringe were to discontinue his service due to death, disability or any other reason, or if his reputation is adversely impacted by personal actions or omissions or other events within or outside his control, we would be significantly disadvantaged.”

Scaringe isn’t only in generating a windfall from his company’s IPO. Rivian’s corporate backers are sitting on even bigger sums.

Amazon, which invested more than $1.3 billion in Rivian, owns a stake worth $19.7 billion as of Thursday’s close. The company said in September that its equity investments, including Rivian, were worth a total of $3.8 billion.

T. Rowe Price and its funds own shares in Rivian valued at over $16 billion. Global Oryx, a unit of Saudi Arabia’s Abdul Latif Jameel Companies, controls about $14 billion worth of shares, while Ford owns a stake worth $12.6 billion.

WATCH: Who is Rivian’s billionaire founder?

Shares of the electric vehicle start-up Rivian continued to climb Thursday, up about 11%, one day after its public market debut.

The Amazon– and Ford-backed company already surpassed both Ford and General Motors by market cap, reaching a valuation of more than $95 billion. That’s still far behind Tesla’s market cap of more than $1 trillion.

GM’s market cap was $88.3 billion mid-morning on Thursday while Ford’s was $78.2 billion.

The valuation means Amazon’s 20% stake in the business is now worth more than $19 billion and puts Ford’s 12% stake at more than $11 billion.

The price is especially staggering given that Rivian does not yet have an established business model and only expects to make up to $1 million in revenue for the third quarter. It said in its prospectus that it expects to lose up to $1.28 billion during that quarter.

Rivian beat rivals to the market with a fully electric pickup but has yet to produce high volumes of its vehicles.

Amazon plans to use Rivian vehicles in its delivery fleet, having ordered 100,000 to be delivered by 2030. It expects to have 10,000 Rivian vehicles delivering Amazon packages as early as next year.

-CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Annie Palmer contributed to this report.

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WATCH: The race between Tesla, GM, Rivian and others to dominate electric pickup trucks

Rajiv Patel, an environmental consultant in Austin, Texas, put down a $1,000 deposit on a Rivian electric SUV earlier this year. He has no idea when he’ll get his vehicle, called the R1S, but his down payment is paying off in a very different way.

As a pre-order customer, Patel was able to buy into Rivian’s IPO on Tuesday night as part of the company’s directed share program. He purchased the maximum 175 shares for $13,650 at the $78 IPO price. After the stock popped 29% on Thursday, Patel’s stake is now worth $17,628.

“When I invest in these companies, I’m always a long hold guy,” said Patel, 45, adding that he invested in Tesla not long after its 2010 IPO and also bought shares in Lucid Motors, which went public in July. “I’m definitely not a meme stock guy. With these three, I feel good about the tech.”

The tech is all Patel can currently bet on. Following its Nasdaq debut on Wednesday, Rivian has a market cap of $86 billion, higher than Ford and about equal to General Motors, even though the company is projecting revenue of between zero and $1 million for the third quarter.

Rivian reserved up to 7% of the IPO shares for DSP participants, as the company laid out in its prospectus. Eligible investors fell into two categories: People who reserved either an R1S or an R1T electric truck as of Sept. 30, and company officers, directors and their affiliates. The deposits are refundable.

The program follows similar moves by Airbnb, Uber and Doximity, which set aside shares in their offerings for hosts, drivers and doctors, respectively. What sets Rivian’s DSP apart is that the EV company doesn’t have actual customers yet, despite a backlog of 55,400 pre-orders, as of Oct. 31.

Assuming the DSP allocated all its available shares, participants collectively invested about $835 million into Rivian’s stock. As of Wednesday’s close, those shares are worth a total of close to $1.08 billion, representing a paper gain of around $245 million.

Joshua White, a finance professor at Vanderbilt University, said it’s a great deal for those who can participate because hot IPO stocks almost always enjoy a first-day pop, and retail investors usually get shut out. DSP investors can also sell immediately if they choose because they’re not subject to a post-IPO lock-up period.

“You kind of know going in this is going to be a pretty good sweetheart deal for customers who sign up,” said White, who previously served as an economist for the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Not having a product, it’s a way to extend some goodwill upfront so they can lock in those returns right away.”

Patel received his first email about Rivian’s DSP last month and was told he needed to pre-register by Oct. 25. The program was being run by Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter on the IPO.

After the stock priced at $78 late Tuesday, Patel was able to go into his Morgan Stanley account and select how many shares he wanted, up to 175. He selected the max and transferred the money.

Patel said that while he’s a big fan of Tesla, the Rivian R1S will be his first electric vehicle, though he’s not sure when it will arrive. Rivian said it plans to deliver its backlogged vehicles by the end of 2023. In the meantime, the company is developing delivery vehicles for Amazon, which ordered 100,000 to be delivered by 2030, including 10,000 as early as next year.

Patel, who has two kids, is willing to wait for the SUV, which has seven seats. Tesla’s Models X and Y seat five.

“Having a family with two young children, an SUV is a lot more functional than the Y or X,” Patel said. He also put down a refundable deposit on a Lucid vehicle, “but I think I’m fully committed to Rivian at this point,” Patel said.

As for his investments, he’s mostly focused on clean-tech companies. However, he admitted that he sold some Tesla shares last year, missing out on the 2021 rally.

“I had to buy a house,” Patel said. “But the housing market in Austin is great, so no regrets there.”

WATCH: Rivian debuted on the Nadaq today

Rivian Automotive will make its market debut Wednesday, in what’s expected to be one of the biggest IPOs of the year.

The electric vehicle maker’s stock is indicated to open at $125 a share, implying a valuation of as much as $106.6 billion and a 60% pop from its IPO price of $78 a share.

On Tuesday, Rivian priced its shares at $78, above the expected range, to raise about $11.9 billion. That share price gives Rivian a valuation of $66.5 billion, making it slightly less valuable than traditional automotive giants like GM and Ford.

The stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol RIVN.

Rivian, which is backed by Amazon and Ford, has attracted intense interest from investors looking to capitalize on the fast-growing EV market.

Amazon has a 20% stake in Rivian. It invested more than $1.3 billion in the young automaker prior to its IPO. Ford and Cox Automotive each hold more than 5% stakes in Rivian.

While Ford executives have billed their Rivian relationship as a strategic investment, the company’s Lincoln division had previously planned to build electric vehicles with the upstart. Those plans were abandoned during the pandemic.

Amazon, which is converting its fleet to vehicles that run on renewable energy, revealed in 2019 that it was purchasing thousands of vehicles from Rivian. More recent filings show Amazon has some exclusive rights to Rivian’s battery-electric delivery vehicles for a minimum of four years, with the right of first refusal after that.

Amazon has ordered 100,000 Rivian vehicles to be delivered by 2030. The companies plan to have 10,000 new Rivian-Amazon delivery vehicles on the road as early as next year.

Besides its fleet business, Rivian beat Tesla, GM and Ford to the market with a fully electric pickup, the R1T. It plans to launch a seven-passenger battery-electric SUV, the R1S, in December, according to an October prospectus.

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, who has a Ph.D. from the Sloan Automotive Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded Rivian in 2009. The company’s headquarters is in Irvine, California, and it has a vehicle assembly plant in Normal, Illinois.

The company says its factory in Illinois has the capacity to produce up to 150,000 vehicles per year. About 65,000 of those should be R1T pickup trucks and SUVs, and about 85,000 should be the company’s RCV commercial delivery vans, Rivian said in financial filings.

But Rivian is still a relative upstart, and it hasn’t started generating real revenue. Rivian said in its prospectus that it will lose up to $1.28 billion in the third quarter, while revenue will range from zero to $1 million.

It also hasn’t produced its electric vehicles in very high volumes yet. It’s not clear how quickly it can ramp up production, especially amid the global chip shortage and port constraints that have plagued automakers this year.

Rivian said in an amendment to its S-1 filing that it has a backlog of pre-orders for 55,400 R1T and R1S vehicles from customers in North America and plans to deliver these by the end of 2023. 

New legislation awaiting President Joe Biden’s signature will provide $7.5 billion in federal grants to build a national network of electric vehicle charging stations, and Rivian could stand to benefit. Scaringe has emphasized that Rivian vehicles are ideal for people with a sense of adventure and a love of the outdoors. As such, the company is placing charging stations in out of the way destinations, like state or national parks.

Rivian counted 6,274 employees as of the end of June.

One of its former executives recently sued Rivian accusing the company of having a “toxic bro culture,” wrongfully terminating her employment there, and in so doing, costing her “millions of dollars in unvested equity on the eve of the company’s IPO.”

In the lawsuit, Laura Schwab — who previously led Aston Martin’s U.S. operations — also claims the company dismissed concerns she had raised regarding Rivian’s business, including its “ability to deliver on its promises to investors.”

WATCH: EV maker Rivian prices IPO above expected range ahead of IPO

Rivian Automotive, the electric vehicle maker backed by Amazon and Ford, priced its IPO on Tuesday at $78 a share, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the sale hasn’t been announced yet. The deal values Rivian at $66.5 billion.

Should underwriters exercise their full purchase option, the company will have a market cap of over $68 billion. The stock will trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol RIVN.

Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported on the IPO price earlier. A Rivian spokesperson declined to comment.

Last week, Rivian increased the expected price range to between $72 and $74 from a previous range of $57 to $62. At its $78 offer price, Rivian is already worth almost as much as Ford ($79 billion) and General Motors ($85 billion). That’s all before the company has even started generating real revenue.

Rivian said in its prospectus that it will lose up to $1.28 billion in the third quarter, while revenue will range from zero to $1 million. It’s the latest EV company to attract hefty investor capital at a stratospheric price without yet proving that it has a sustainable business model.

Lucid Motors is worth $72.5 billion even though the company just began production of its first cars. Nikola’s market cap was higher than Ford’s at one point last year, despite the company having no revenue. It’s now worth less than $6 billion, after a short-selling firm accused the company of making “an Ocean of Lies.”

Investors are continuously trying to hop on the next Tesla. Elon Musk’s company topped $1 trillion in market value last month and is now the fifth most-valuable U.S. company.

While Rivian is still effectively pre-revenue, the company said in its prospectus that it has a backlog of 55,400 pre-orders for its R1T and R1S electric vehicles. The R1T is a truck that starts at $67,500, and the R1S is an SUV starting at $70,000, according to Rivian’s website.

The company said it expects to fill those orders by the end of 2023. Additionally, Amazon has ordered 100,000 vehicles to be delivered by Rivian by 2030, and the companies plan to have 10,000 new Rivian-Amazon delivery vehicles on the road as early as next year. Amazon is pushing its fleet to renewable energy sources, and said in 2019 that it was purchasing thousands of vehicles from Rivian.

Amazon, which invested more than $1.3 billion into Rivian, owned 22.4% of the company’s Class A shares prior to the IPO. That stake is worth about $12.5 billion at the offer price. Ford owned 14.4% of Class A stock before the offering, a stake now valued at $8 billion.

Rivian says its factory in Illinois has the capacity to produce up to 150,000 vehicles per year. The company had over 6,000 employees as of the end of June.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Annie Palmer contributed to this report

WATCH: Should you believe the Rivian hype?

Tesla stock was down by as much as 11% in mid-day trading on Tuesday, extending losses for a second day, after CEO Elon Musk over the weekend proposed selling 10% of his shares in the electric vehicle business.

The drop is on pace to be the largest of the year for the stock, and comes after a fall of nearly 5% on Monday, tempering a mostly upward trend for the year. Overall, Tesla shares are up more than 47% in 2021 and have more than doubled from one year ago, as the company reported improved automotive margins and navigated a chip shortage to ramp production while competitors faltered.

Current and former board members including chairwoman Robyn Denholm, Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk, Ira Ehrenpreis and Antonio Gracias have also offloaded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Tesla shares since Oct. 28 after Tesla’s market cap surpassed $1 trillion.

Musk was awarded a hefty options package as part of a CEO performance plan in 2012. Because he doesn’t take a salary or cash bonus, his wealth comes from those stock awards and gains in Tesla’s share price. The 2012 award was for 22.8 million shares at a strike price of $6.24 per share. Those are due to expire on Aug. 13, 2022.

He has additional options from an unprecedented 2018 CEO pay package as well.

The iconoclastic CEO has pledged at least 92 million of his Tesla shares to lenders for cash borrowing. As CNBC previously reported, Musk may want to sell some shares to pay down his debt, and he faces a potential $15 billion tax bill on his windfall as he exercises his options and sells shares.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

–Yun Li contributed to this story

Bitcoin and ether hit new all-time highs on Monday evening.

Bitcoin’s price at one point rose above $67,700 – eclipsing a previous record set in late October – while ether, the native token of ethereum’s blockchain, surpassed $4,800 for the first time ever.

These record-breaking moves come amid a wider rally in the crypto market. So-called “ethereum killers” Solana and Cardano are up 23% and 9% respectively in the last seven days.

The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, which launched in October and tracks bitcoin futures contracts pegged to the future price of the cryptocurrency, was up more than 8% on Monday.

While it is difficult to link short-term price movements to any specific event – and cryptocurrency price charts are often rife with volatility – some analysts think that both bitcoin and ether will continue to trend upward in the weeks ahead.

In a note sent on Monday, Mikkel Morch, executive director at crypto hedge fund ARK36, said a $70,000 price for bitcoin now “seems imminent.”

Others have bolder projections for where bitcoin is headed, as JPMorgan recently doubled down on its prediction that bitcoin would ultimately hit $146,000, with a shorter-term price target of $73,000 for this year.

Next week, bitcoin rolls out its biggest upgrade in four years.

The software upgrade is known as Taproot. It will mean greater transaction privacy and efficiency – and crucially, it will unlock the potential for smart contracts, a key feature of its blockchain technology.

Meanwhile, ether has been on an upswing since it implemented Altair, a network upgrade that went live in late October.

Altair was largely seen as a non-event to most everyone except validators — that is, the people on the ethereum network who verify transactions. But the upgrade was a pivotal step in implementing ethereum 2.0 or Eth2, which has been in the works for years and will fundamentally overhaul the entire network.

Ethereum 2.0 would have the network switch from the energy-intensive “proof-of-work” mining system, where miners solve difficult math equations to create new coins, to “proof-of-stake,” which just requires users to leverage their existing cache of ether as a means to verify transactions and mint new tokens.

Eth2 aims to make ethereum more scalable, secure and sustainable. This change will be huge not just for ethereum, but for the wider cryptocurrency community at large.