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.
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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.