Elon Musk sells another $3.58 billion worth of Tesla shares

Elon Musk sold another $3.5 billion worth of Tesla shares, in a form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. Since November 2021, the peak of Tesla’s stock price, Musk has sold more than $39 billion worth of stock, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Musk last filed Tesla stock sales with the SEC in November, when it sold $3.4 billion. Before that, he sold $8.4 billion in April and $6.9 billion (nice) in August. He said he was done selling twice, once in april and once in august.

Musk launched his social media site, Twitter, into the ground after reaching the agreement to acquire the company on October 28. Advertisers fled the company, and in November, visits to Twitter’s Ads Manager fell 85% from a year earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported. In its final year as a public company, 89% of Twitter’s revenue came from advertising. Twitter has stopped paying rent for some of its offices and stiff travel sellers. The company in difficulty has already suffered several waves of layoffs.

Twitter will have to pay about $1 billion a year in debt as part of the takeover, and some of the banks that provided the loans are preparing to book losses on that debt this quarter. A way for Musk to avoid ugliness is to personally pay Twitter’s debt.

Musk has often tapped into his fandom, using his Twitter account to rally retail investors. He courted these investors – and in 2018 he presented them with ways ask questions during phone calls. At the end of the day today, shares of Tesla closed at $156.80, which The Wall Street Journal said is the lowest level in more than two years.