Elon Musk‘s legal battle with Twitter, following his decision to back out of his $44 billion bid to purchase the company, doesn’t hit the courts until October, but his latest move could provide more ammo for his opposing party come trial time.
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Per a new SEC filing Tuesday night, it was revealed Musk sold an estimated 7.92 million Tesla shares worth an estimated $6.99 billion between August 5th and 9th.
And though Musk has been offloading Tesla stock this year in an attempt to finance his Twitter bid (the billionaire sold an estimated $8.5 billion in shares back in April), he claimed that he was finished doing so.
“No further TSLA sales planned after today,” Musk said on Twitter on April 28.
However, trouble with the Twitter merger has led Musk to continue to sell shares in the event that Twitter’s attempt to make Musk finish out the payment for his bid in full goes through, he confirmed on Twitter late Tuesday.
“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,” Musk wrote on the platform.
This was something Twitter was already weary of — the company had previously filed multiple subpoenas’ to Musk’s banks, associates, and other affiliates in an attempt to gain knowledge of the billionaire’s financial standing regarding his attempt to acquire the company.
Twenty-seven subpoenas were sent to Tesla and Tesla executives under the guise of finding out what Musk’s internal communications were regarding the acquisition of Twitter, and how Tesla might play a role in funding.
Amid the legal drama, Musk took to the social media platform over the weekend to challenge Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a “public debate” about how many accounts on the platform are spam and bot accounts, after admitting that the deal could “proceed” as promised if Agrawal and Twitter could provide Musk with their data method for finding the spam and bot accounts.
Tesla seemed to benefit from the news. The company was up over 22% in a one-year period early Wednesday afternoon and over 2% at the same time from the day prior.
