Musk has sold a total of $39 billion worth of stock since November 2021 (when Tesla shares peaked), and now plans to “say goodbye” to another batch of securities worth about $3.5 billion, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Before that, Musk, who recently lost the title of the world’s richest man (his wealth has almost halved from a peak of $340 billion, including the purchase of Twitter), last filed a statement with the SEC in November — when he sold $3.4 billion worth of shares.
He also previously sold stakes worth $8.4 billion in April and $6.9 billion in August. He later tweeted twice that he was “committed” to selling Tesla shares, but something seems to have gone wrong.
No further TSLA sales planned after today
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2022
Course
FINANCIAL ANALYSIS
After closing the deal to acquire Twitter, everything is not going according to plan in the social network, and also in Musk. Advertisers continue to leave the site (the New York Times reported that as of October, the number of Twitter advertisers was down nearly 42% from May), and in November, visits to the social network’s ad manager were down 85% from a year earlier, according to The Wall Street Journal. An earlier article also noted that Twitter essentially started offering its ads at half price. In the last year of Twitter’s public activity, almost 89% of revenue came from advertising.
Overall, the Twitter deal was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. To close it, Elon piled on about $13 billion in debt — the company now makes less money a year than it owes its creditors. Musk can turn to investors for help, or he can pay off the debt personally, including using funds received from shares in Tesla.
At the end of the previous day, the automaker’s shares closed at $156.80 a unit, the lowest level in more than two years, according to The Wall Street Journal.
JUST IN: Tesla $TSLA market capitalization falls below $500 billion for the first time in 2 years.
— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) December 13, 2022
Earlier, another Musk company, SpaceX, offered to sell internal shares at a price that would raise the company’s valuation to $140 billion.
Source: The Verge
