Elon Musk Sells $6.9 Bln Tesla Stock as Twitter Legal Battle Looms

By Ambar Warrick 

Investing.com-- Elon Musk sold about $6.9 billion worth of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) stock over the past week, a filing revealed on Wednesday, as the Tesla CEO faces a potentially expensive legal battle with Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) over a buyout offer. 

Tweeting on the sales, Musk said that he was done selling Tesla stock for now, and said it was important to avoid an “emergency sale” of Tesla stock to potentially fund a takeover of Twitter.

“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 said in a tweet. 

He also said that he would buy Tesla stock again if the Twitter deal were to not close. 

Overnight SEC filings showed that Musk sold about 7.9 million Tesla shares worth about $6.9 billion. Musk offloaded the stake between August 5 to August 9, and now holds about 155 million shares in Tesla, worth $32 billion.  

Musk faces a prolonged legal battle with Twitter, as the social media platform seeks to make Musk honor his $44 billion buyout offer.

The world’s richest man offered to take the social media platform private in April, but has since rescinded the offer over an alleged lack of transparency from Twitter over the number of bots on its platform. Twitter has denied such a move. 

The two parties are set to go to court in October, with Musk facing either a forced buyout of Twitter, or a hefty fine for calling off the deal. 

Musk had sold about $8.5 billion worth of Tesla shares in April after announcing the deal. He had then also said that there would be no more stock sales on his end.