Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, has reportedly sold 7.92mn Tesla shares worth a whooping US$6.88bn in what is one of the centi-billionaire’s largest offloads of the electric carmaker’s shares in recent times.
Details of the share sales were revealed by the SEC in financial filings published last evening (August 9). Musk’s transactions were said to have occurred between August 5 and 9 as per the report following Tesla’s 2022 annual shareholder meeting on August 4 in Austin, Texas.
SEC filings revealed that Musk had been selling a block of shares in Tesla worth about US$8.4bn that week, as per a report issued by CNBC.
While no more details have been mentioned, it is speculated that Musk’s sale of the shares would be to ward off any unprecedented financial limitations should the US$44bn Twitter buyout go ahead as planned.
On July 8, he revealed that he would be terminating the deal after accusing the company of failing to give him all the information needed to go ahead with the acquisition; including understating the number of bots, spam and fake accounts.
Elon Musk is currently in the midst of a legal battle with the social networking website that he agreed to acquire in April at US$54.20 per share.
In a tweet to Musk by user Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) asking whether he was “done selling” the stock, he replied: “Yes,” before adding, “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 did not specify which equity partners he feared would fail to finance his transaction. An earlier SEC filing from May 2022 revealed 19 different financing partners, including Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud; Qatari Holding; and venture firms Sequoia, DFJ growth fund, Vy Capital, and cryptocurrency exchange Binance.
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 10, 2022
When asked by Twitter user Ian (@cybrtrck) whether he would buy back Tesla stock if the Twitter deal doesn’t close, Musk replied: “Yes.”
Yes
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 10, 2022
Market conditions notwithstanding, Tesla’s share price dropped following the SEC revelation, with the ‘TSLA’ trading at US$850.00 – which is -2.44 per cent lower than its value on Monday [August 8].
