Elon Musk Sells Tesla Shares Worth $6.88b
Elon Musk sold Tesla worth approx. $6.88 billion between August 5 and 9, a series of SEC filings published Tuesday night showed, CNBC reported. The transactions took place after Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting on August 4 in Austin, Texas. 7.92 million shares were sold.
He sold Tesla shares for almost $9b in April
Previously, the Tesla CEO had said that he had “no further TSLA sales planned” after April 28. That week, filings showed he had sold Tesla shares worth about $8.4 billion.
Market drove Twitter and Tesla shares down
Musk is battling Twitter in court after reversing his decision to acquire the social media giant for about $44 billion in April. Twitter’s share price dropped amid an overall market decline. Tesla’s share price dropped soon thereafter. It was almost flat in the hours after the latest news.
Twitter is suing Musk to make him go through with the deal for the amount agreed. This would be a bonanza for many of its shareholders.
After the hectobillionaire’s latest stock sales were revealed on Tuesday, Tesla supporters asked him if he would ever repurchase shares in the electric carmaker or if he had plans to sell more. He said:
In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close and some equity partners don’t come through, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock.
He added he would repurchase some shares if he didn’t have to go through with the Twitter acquisition. In this case, he would also create X.com, his own social medium.
19 equity partners for Twitter
At the beginning of May, Musk had secured equity financing from Qatari Holding, crypto exchange Binance, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, and venture firms DFJ Growth Fund, Sequoia, and Vy Capital, and the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. His equity partners numbered 19 in total.
