California: Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has sold 19.5 million shares of the electric vehicle maker worth $3.95 billion, according to U.S. securities filings, days after he completed the $44 billion takeover of Twitter Inc.
Musk sold almost $22 billion worth of Tesla shares in 2021, a year when the stock jumped over 50%. This year, he sold over $8 billion worth of stock in April and roughly $7 billion worth in August.
In addition to pouring billions of his own capital into taking Twitter private, the Tesla CEO relied on partners, including equity investors Binance, Ron Baron’s BAMCO, Andreessen Horowitz, Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, to finance the deal, or to roll their existing shares into his holding company for Twitter.
On Aug. 9, Musk told fans he was done selling Tesla shares to fund a possible Twitter acquisition. He wrote, in a tweet, “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.”
At the time, Musk was still battling Twitter in court to try to get out of the deal — which he proposed and agreed to in April.
Since closing the purchase, Musk has pulled dozens of Tesla engineers to Twitter to assist him with code review and other work.
Tesla shares are down 46% this year, wiping out a big chunk of Musk’s fortune. However, he’s still the world’s richest person with a net worth of close to $200 billion, according to Forbes.
At a conference last week, Musk told hedge fund manager Ron Baron that his “workload went up from about, I don’t know 78 hours a week to probably 120.”
Musk, who’s also CEO of SpaceX, said on stage that “once Twitter is set on the right path, I think it is a much easier thing to manage” than his other companies. Musk hasn’t said who will be the new CEO of Twitter, but he’s suggested that his role as “Chief Twit” and sole director at the company is only temporary.
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