Following the completion of his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk sold at least an additional $3.95 billion worth of shares in his electric vehicle firm Tesla. Musk sold 19.5 million more shares in Tesla, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and made public on Tuesday.
Tesla shares valued at about $22 billion were sold by Musk in 2021, a year in which the stock appreciated by over 50%. He sold stock worth about $8 billion in April and almost $7 billion in August of this year.
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 Abdul aziz of Saudi Arabia, to finance the deal or to roll their existing shares into his holding company for twitter. He also invested billions of dollars of his own money into taking Twitter private.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn), who supported Musk’s takeover of Twitter, has requested a probe into the potential effects Saudi Arabia’s ownership of the company may have on national security, as NBCNews previously reported.
Musk informed his followers on August 9 that he has stopped selling Tesla stock in order to raise money for a potential Twitter acquisition. In a tweet, he stated, “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.”
When the deal was suggested and accepted in April, Musk was still suing the social media business to try to get out of it.
Musk has summoned dozens of Tesla engineers to Twitter to help him with code reviews and other tasks since finalizing the deal.
Tesla shares dropped by 46%
Tesla shares have lost 46% of their value compared to the Nasdaq Composite, which has dropped around 33% year to date, completely wiping out Musk’s wealth. With a net worth of around $200 billion, he is still the richest man in the world, according to Forbes.
Musk told the hedge fund manager Ron Baron that his “workload went up from approximately, I don’t know, 78 hours a week to perhaps 120” at a conference last week.
Musk, who is also the CEO of SpaceX, claimed on stage that managing Twitter will be far simpler than running his other businesses if it was “put on the proper course.” Although Musk hasn’t named the new CEO of Twitter, he has hinted that his position as the company’s only director and “Chief Twit” is only temporary.