According to a filing made public on Wednesday, Elon Musk sold approximately $6.9 billion in Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) stock in the previous week.The Tesla CEO is in the middle of a potentially expensive legal battle with Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) over a buyout offer, and this fight could cost him a lot of money.
Musk tweeted about the sales and said he was done selling Tesla stock for now. He also said it was important to avoid a “emergency sale” of Tesla stock to possibly pay for a takeover of Twitter.
In a tweet, Musk said, “It is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock in the (hopefully unlikely) case that Twitter forces this deal to close and some equity partners don’t come through.”
He also said that if the Twitter deal fell through, he would buy Tesla stock again.
Overnight, Musk turned in paperwork to the SEC that showed he sold about 7.9 million Tesla shares worth about $6.9 billion. Between August 5 and August 9, Musk sold the stake. He now owns about 155 million shares of Tesla, which are worth $32 billion.
Musk and Twitter will be in court for a long time because Twitter wants Musk to take up his $44 billion buyout offer.
In April, the richest person in the world made an offer to take the social media platform private. He has since withdrawn the offer because he thinks Twitter isn’t being honest about the number of bots on its platform. Twitter has said that this won’t happen.
The two sides are going to court in October. Musk could be forced to buy out Twitter or have to pay a big fine if he backs out of the deal.
After announcing the deal in April, Musk sold about $8.5 billion worth of Tesla shares. He had also said at that time that he would not sell any more stocks.
