Elon Musk has sold nearly 8 million shares of Tesla stock worth about $7 billion as Twitter closes a $44 billion deal to acquire the social media platform In the event, “it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla shares,” the Tesla CEO stressed.
Elon Musk sold about 8 million TSLA shares
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sold 7,924,107 shares of Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) Tuesday night, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The transactions took place on August 5, 8, and 9. At the time of writing, the sales amounted to $6.86 billion.
Musk confirmed on Twitter that he had closed the sale of Tesla shares in a reply to a tweet from a Tesla investor. The billionaire said, “It is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla shares if Twitter does not force this deal to close (hopefully unlikely)* and some equity partner comes in.” He added.
Musk also said he would buy Tesla stock again if the Twitter deal does not close.
In May, the billionaire revealed that he had secured funding for the Twitter acquisition from 18 companies, including Sequoia Capital Fund, Binance, AH Capital Management (aka Andreesen Horowitz, a16z), and Fidelity.
Mr. Musk does not sell Tesla stock often. Prior to this deal, he sold 9.6 million Tesla shares in April, worth about $8.5 billion at one time. After the sale, the Tesla and SpaceX boss tweeted on April 28 that “No further TSLA sales planned.”
In April, Musk had made an offer to buy Twitter for about $44 billion. However, the billionaire formally terminated the deal in early July, claiming that “Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions of its agreement.”
Twitter sued Musk, forcing him to execute the deal. The Tesla CEO countersued Twitter, accusing the social media giant of fraud. At the heart of the dispute is Twitter’s claim that less than 5% of its daily users are fake or spam accounts; Musk disagrees and challenged Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a public debate about bots and spam users on the platform.
In reply to a tweet asking if Musk had considered creating his own social platform if the deal with Twitter did not go through, Musk wrote, “X.com.
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