Elon Musk, the highly publicized and whimsical CEO of Tesla, is currently in the middle of a dispute with the social network Twitter.
Indeed, last April, he signed an agreement to buy this giant, for an amount of 44 billion dollars. At the same time, he had already sold $8.5 billion of his Tesla shares to prepare for his acquisition. Asserting at the time that there would be no further share sales from him.
However, Musk now claims that Twitter cheated on the number of “automated” or “junk” accounts. He even goes so far as to say that the social network has defrauded, by voluntarily increasing the number of “monetizable” accounts. He therefore unilaterally terminated the contract at the beginning of July.
Which was not to the taste of Twitter, which sued the multi-billionaire to honor his promise! Which counterattacked before the same court to be released from the agreement and to obtain damages from Twitter.
Elon Musk has his back
Suddenly, to secure his back, in the event of a defeat (which he hopes is unlikely), Musk has decided to sell additional shares. According to the SEC (the policeman of the American stock market), he offloaded 7.9 million shares between August 5 and 9. For a total amount of just under $7 billion. Their price having been between these two dates, between 926 dollars and 861 dollars.
This share sale also caused its price to fall on Friday August 5, before it rose again on August 8, but fell back to 850 dollars only yesterday at 4 p.m.
Elon Musk explained for his part in a tweet overnight from yesterday to today, having wanted “avoid an emergency sale of Tesla shares“, in the unlikely event that it would ultimately be forced to buy Twitter and lose the support of its financial partners.
The story should end in the fall, after a trial which is due to last from October 17 to 22.