Elon Musk made $8.4 billion this week through a series of stock sales at Tesla, the electric car company he leads, ostensibly to fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
On April 26 and 27, Musk, the world’s richest man, sold around 4.4 million shares of Tesla at various prices between $870 and $1,000 per share, netting roughly $4 billion. According to insider transaction filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday. According to other filings made on Friday, he sold another 5.4 million Telsa shares for $4.4 billion on April 28. The stock transactions happened after Twitter’s board of directors approved the billionaire’s $54.20 per share purchase. He still holds around 163 million Tesla shares, or nearly 16 percent of the company.
On Thursday evening, Musk tweeted, “No further TSLA sales planned after today.”
Musk acquired $46.5 billion in financing for the Twitter takeover, including $21 billion in cash, $13 billion in debt facilities, and $12.5 billion in margin loans, the latter of which is secured against Musk’s Tesla assets, from banks led by Morgan Stanley.
Since Musk initially reported acquiring a 9.2 percent interest in Twitter in early April, Tesla shares have plummeted more than 23% through Thursday. Tesla shares were up more than 4.5 percent as of 10:30 a.m. ET on Friday, after the stock sale announcements.
Musk sold more than $15 billion in Tesla stock last year, primarily to pay taxes on vested stock options that he exercised before they were set to expire. According to Forbes, Musk, who is also the CEO of SpaceX, has a net worth of almost $260 billion.