Bloomberg News reports that Elon Musk sold $6.9 billion worth of Tesla stock, stating that he wants to avert a sudden sale in case he is forced to move ahead with the Twitter Inc deal. The chief executive officer of Tesla sold as many as 7.92 million shares on August 5th, as per the release of regulatory filings on Tuesday after the markets closed.
Musk also tweeted that he has done with selling shares and that he plans to buy the shares back if the Twitter deal is not closed. Tesla surged 3.4% to the $879 mark before regular trading started on Wednesday. On the other hand, Twitter jumped from $44.69 to 4.3%.
Musk has, to date, sold around $32 billion worth of shares of Tesla since November. The richest person in the world had also said around four months ago that he did not have any further plans to sell off the shares and wished to terminate the $44 billion Twitter Inc. deal. The microblogging site has filed a lawsuit against Musk in this regard.
Rollercoaster Ride
However, shares of Tesla have surged, yet they remain down this year. The market fortunes of Tesla have been in tandem with the Twitter deal since the time Musk had given offers to invest in Twitter Inc.
When Musk gave up the plan to partially fund the Twitter purchase with a margin loan from Tesla, it enhanced the size of the equity component to $33.5 billion related to the deal. He has earlier announced having acquired $7.1 billion of equity commitments from billionaire investors like Binance, Sequoia Capital, and Larry Ellison.
Musk has announced that if Twitter provided the methods of determining the number of bots on the platform, he would proceed with the deal on the original terms.
Bloomberg News reports that the Twitter deal encompasses a provision that if the deal falls apart, the party that backs out from the deal would have to shell out a fine of $1 billion under certain conditions.
The selling-off spree of Musk’s Tesla stocks started after he held a poll on Twitter and asked users if he must curb his stake. However, Musk still owns about 14.8% of the company and is the largest stakeholder, as per data collected by Bloomberg.
Musk’s $250.2 billion fortune is the world’s largest, as per Bloomberg Billionaires Index. However, his wealth was found to shrink by approximately $20.1 in the current year after the value of the Tesla stocks dropped.
