Washington: Amid a high-stakes legal battle with Twitter, Elon Musk has sold $6.9 billion of stock in Tesla Inc., the billionaire’s biggest sale on record, saying he wanted to avoid a last-minute selloff of the electric-car maker’s shares in the event he is forced to go ahead with his aborted $44 billion buyout deal. The Tesla CEO sold some 7.9 million shares between August 5 and 9, according to filings published on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website.
As speculation mounted over the reason for the disposal, Musk responded in a series of late night tweets, saying he wanted to avert an emergency sale of stock if he is compelled to complete the $44 billion takeover of Twitter, which he walked away from last month. Asked by followers if he was done selling Tesla shares and would buy the stock again if the deal doesn’t close, Musk responded: ‘Yes’. ‘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, the world’s richest man wrote on Twitter late Tuesday.
Twitter is locked in a legal battle with the mercurial Tesla boss over his effort to walk away from the April agreement to buy the company, and a judge has ordered that a trial will begin in October. Musk has filed a countersuit, accusing Twitter of fraud and alleging the social media platform misled him about key aspects of its business before he agreed to a $44 billion buyout. The move comes after Musk sold around $8.5 billion worth of shares in the electric carmaker in April as he was preparing to finance the Twitter deal. He tweeted at the time: ‘No further TSLA sales planned after today’.
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