Elon Musk Sold $6.9 billion worth of Tesla Inc stock. According to regulatory filings on Tuesday. This is the first time that the automaker’s shares have been handed over since it abandoned its bid to buy Twitter Inc.
The Tesla CEO sold the shares on August 5, according to new documents. Musk has now sold $32 billion worth of stock in the electric car maker in the past 10 months. It was not immediately clear the purpose of the latest sales.
Tesla shares plunged late last year as Musk dumped more than $16 billion in stock, his first sales in more than five years. The sales began in November after Musk polled Twitter users on whether he should cut his stake.
Shares are up 35% from their recent lows in May.
With a fortune of $250.2 billion, Musk is the richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His fortune has fallen by $20 billion this year as Tesla shares have fallen from about $1,200 earlier in the year.
Musk said last month he was ending his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter and making it private, saying the company had made “misleading representations” about the number of spam bots on the service. Twitter has since filed a lawsuit to force Musk to complete the deal, with a trial in Delaware Chancery Court in October.
Over the weekend, Musk tweeted that if Twitter offers its own account sampling method to determine the number of bots and how they’ve been confirmed as real, “the deal should continue on original terms.”
In May, Musk dropped plans to partially finance the purchase with a marginal loan tied to his stake in Tesla and increased the size of the equity component of the deal to $33.5 billion. It previously announced that it had secured $7.1 billion in capital commitments from investors including billionaire Larry Ellison, Sequoia Capital and Binance.
With information from Bloomberg
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