Elon Musk Offloads $7 Billion Worth Of Tesla Shares Amid Twitter Spat: Report

Elon Musk sold about 79.2 lakh shares on August 5. The sale comes just four months after Musk said he had no further plans to sell Tesla shares after disposing of $8.5 billion of stock

Tesla Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Elon Musk offloaded $6.9 billion of shares in the American electric automaker, according to regulatory filings on Tuesday, just months after saying he didn’t plan to sell any more stock in Tesla, news agency Bloomberg reported.

According to the SEC filings, Musk sold about 79.2 lakh shares on August 5. The sale comes just four months after Musk, the world’s richest person, said he had no further plans to sell Tesla shares after disposing of $8.5 billion of stock in the wake of his now-pulled deal to buy Twitter Inc.

"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," Musk wrote on Twitter on late Tuesday.

Over the past 10 months, 51-year-old Musk has now sold $32 billion worth of stock in Tesla. The process started in November after Musk polled users of the platform on whether he should trim his stake. The purpose of the latest sales wasn’t immediately clear.

According to the report, Tesla shares have risen about 35 per cent from recent lows reached in May, though are still down about 20 per cent this year.

Last month, Musk had said he was terminating his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter and take it private, claiming the company has made “misleading representations” over the number of spam bots on the service. Twitter has since sued to force Musk to consummate the deal, and a trial in the Delaware Chancery Court has been set for October.

At the weekend, Musk tweeted that if Twitter provided its method of sampling accounts to determine the number of bots and how they are confirmed to be real, “the deal should proceed on original terms.”

In May, Musk dropped plans to partially fund the purchase with a margin loan tied to his Tesla stake and increased the size of the equity component of the deal to $33.5 billion.

He had previously announced that he secured $7.1 billion of equity commitments from investors, including billionaire Larry Ellison, Sequoia Capital, and Binance.