Elon Musk’s Tesla Share Sales Approach the $40 Billion Mark
Elon Musk sold another $3.58 billion worth of Tesla Inc. shares, bringing the total amount he's offloaded since late last year to almost $40 billion.
The latest disposal of about 22 million shares this week coincided with Musk falling from the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a position he'd occupied since September of last year. Tesla's market value also has slumped below the half-trillion-dollar mark for the first time since November 2020.
The disclosure sent Tesla shares down as much as 3.5% to $151.33 before the start of regular trading Thursday. The stock has plunged 55% this year through Wednesday's close.
Musk's persistent selling after repeated assurances that he was done unloading Tesla stock reflects mounting pressure on the finances of Twitter Inc. His erratic and impulsive approach to running the social media company has alienated advertisers, and efforts to bring in more revenue from subscription fees backfired when impostor accounts exploited a poorly executed rollout of verification badges.
The chaos at Twitter has been an overhang on Tesla, which is facing its own set of challenges. The electric-car maker has cut prices and production this quarter in China and taken the rare step of offering incentives in the US. Musk has said the company is struggling to cope with the effects that China's slumping property market, Europe's energy crisis and the Federal Reserve's interest rate increases are having on demand.
Musk tried for months to get out of the Twitter deal but ultimately failed. To help finance the purchase, he offloaded more than $15 billion of Tesla shares before closing the transaction — about $8.5 billion in April, then another $6.9 billion in August. In November, he sold
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