Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc., has sold shares worth $3.95 billion, according to U.S. regulatory filings. This happened just days after he bought Twitter Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) for $44 billion.
Investors sold off Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) stock, which caused Musk’s net worth to drop below $200 billion. Between Friday and Tuesday, Musk sold 19.5 million shares, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Reuters has calculated that Musk now owns about 14% of Tesla after his most recent sale of shares.
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It wasn’t clear what the sale was for.
Analysts had been expecting Musk to sell more Tesla shares to pay for the Twitter deal, so this latest sale dump comes as a surprise.
Musk, who is the richest person in the world, said in April that he would no longer sell Tesla stock. Still, in August, he sold another $6.9 billion worth of Tesla shares and said it was to pay for the social media platform.
Musk, who is the richest person in the world, had about $20 billion in cash after selling some of his Tesla shares, including the ones he sold last year. According to a calculation by Reuters, he would have had to get another $2 billion to $3 billion to pay for the takeover.
Since April, when Musk bid for Twitter, Tesla’s market value has dropped by almost half, and his net worth has dropped by $70 billion.
Reuters asked Twitter and Tesla for comments, but they didn’t answer right away.
Last month, Musk took over Twitter. Since then, he has done a lot of crazy things, like firing half of the staff and coming up with a plan to charge for blue check verification marks.
The billionaire promised to pay for the purchase with equity and debt totaling $46.5 billion. This was enough to cover the $44 billion price tag and the closing costs. Banks, like Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) and Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC), agreed to provide $13 billion in debt financing.
Musk’s $33.5 billion equity commitment included his 9.6% stake in Twitter, which is worth $4 billion, and the $7.1 billion he had gotten from equity investors, such as Oracle Corp. (NYSE:ORCL) co-founder Larry Ellison and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
Related: Musk explains Twitter’s goal, which starts a debate about how accurate the content is.
Musk tried to get out of the deal in May, saying that Twitter had lied about how many spam and bot accounts were on the platform. This led to a number of lawsuits between the two sides.
