Elon Musk has sold another Tesla shares, worth $3.6 billion, amidst the current chaos related to his Twitter acquisition. The sale was announced in a Form 4 filing with the SEC on Wednesday night, according to Electrek.
The sale represents nearly 22 million shares of TSLA sold over the past three trading days at share prices between $156-$176. TSLA stock fell about 20 points in that period, losing over 10% of its value.
Bernard Arnault replaces Musk as the world’s richest man
Musk lost his title as the world’s richest man, which he had first obtained early last year. He was replaced by the CEO of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, Bernard Arnault.
Yesterday, the Tesla CEO took to Twitter to reassure Tesla shareholders that they’d “benefit long term” from his Twitter acquisition. At the time, he was currently offloading millions of shares.
This isn’t the first time Musk has sold TSLA shares since he announced his bid to acquire Twitter. The first was last December after running a Twitter poll about whether he should buy the company, after which he said he sold approximately enough of his Tesla stake to finance the purchase.
$6.9 billion in stock sold in August
However, that is not the only time he stated he’s done selling Tesla stock related to the social media acquisition. In August, Musk sold $6.9 billion in stock, after which he said “Yes” when asked if he was “done selling.”
$3.9 billion in stock sold in November
Musk then went on to sell another $3.9 billion in stock last month. He told Twitter employees in a meeting that this was necessary to “save” the site.
Additional Twitter funding from loans
This latest sale is Musk’s fourth major sale of Tesla stock related to the acquisition, totaling around $16 billion worth. The CEO bought Twitter for $44 billion, though he did gain extra funding in loans from outside sources.
Those loans have about $1 billion total interest bill annually, a significant cost for a company that had, up to now, lost on the order of $200 million quarterly while it was publicly run.
It is unclear what Twitter’s current financial situation is as it’s now private. However, available external signs point to trouble. There has been a massive dropoff in advertising revenue, with advertisers drawing ads from the social media network and desktop visits to their ad manager software dropping by up to 85%.
Between dropping revenue and additional costs for Twitter, Musk looks like he saw the necessity of freeing up more funding for his new company.
While Twitter’s new paid verification option might make up some of that revenue, it’s unlikely to make a difference compared to the additional debt and revenue loss that Twitter currently deals with.
Notably, in the past, Musk had reiterated that he would be the last person to sell Tesla stock.
