Elon Musk sells $4 billion in Tesla stock following the acquisition of Twitter

According to filings published by the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold 19.5 million shares in the electric car company for $3.95 billion.

The move follows his $44 billion purchase of Twitter.

Musk has sold nearly $20 billion in Tesla stock since his initial investment in the social media company in April. Musk declared that he was done selling stock in August before Twitter’s legal action sealed the deal for the takeover.

“In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close *and* some equity partners don’t come through, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock,” he tweeted.

Musk, the world’s richest man, now owns approximately 135 million Tesla shares.

The sale occurred just weeks after Tesla reported $3.3 billion in profit and $21.45 billion in revenue for the third quarter, falling short of Wall Street expectations and causing a 4% drop in the stock on the day. Tesla’s value has fallen 46% this year, but Musk’s net worth remains just under $200 billion.

Musk admitted at the time that he was “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now.”

Musk had pledged to fund the takeover himself, but received $7 billion in funding from investors including Larry Ellison, founder of the Oracle software group, and the cryptocurrency platform Binance. A group of banks also contributed $13 billion to the deal’s financing.

Musk fired the CEO and several top executives after completing the takeover, before laying off up to half of the company’s workforce.

There have been reports in the days since that the company attempted to re-hire some employees after realising their roles were required to keep the site running or to implement some of Musk’s proposed changes to the platform.

Musk had planned to charge $20 per month to apply a blue tick to user accounts as part of a shake-up of the verification system. The monthly fee has now been reduced to $8, with select verified accounts set to have “official” noted on their profiles.

The company postponed the verification change until after the US midterm elections.