Elon Musk sells $3.6bn worth of slumping Tesla stock

Elon Musk, who lost his number one spot on Bloomberg’s ranking of the world’s richest people this week, unloaded Tesla stock for the fourth time this year.

Tesla’s chief executive sold almost 22 million shares of the electric-car maker for $3.58 billion (€3.4 billion), a filing showed late Wednesday in the US. The transactions happened between December 12th and December 14th.

Tesla shares have plunged 55 per cent this year as investors grow increasingly concerned about Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, adding to worries about rising interest rates that make cars more expensive for consumers and demand issues in China, Tesla’s largest market after the US.

Over the weekend, Musk – who is eager to stoke engagement on the social-media platform he now owns – attacked a former Twitter executive and tweeted out conspiracy theories that have alarmed even his most long-time fans.

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Musk tried for months to get out of the Twitter deal but failed. To raise enough cash for the purchase, he offloaded more than $15 billion in Tesla shares – about $8.5 billion in April, then another $6.9 billion in August. In November, after vowing he was done selling, he unloaded another $3.95 billion of his stake.

Musk used significant amounts of borrowed money that now sits on Twitter’s balance sheet to help finance the acquisition. Twitter’s debt load has jumped to about $13 billion, up from $1.7 billion pre-deal, along with other types of bonds that could be converted into stock.

Twitter now faces annual interest payments approaching $1.2 billion – which could get even more expensive given that the interest rates on about half of that debt aren’t locked in and will rise with the market.

“At risk of stating obvious, beware of debt in turbulent macroeconomic conditions, especially when Fed keeps raising rates,” Musk tweeted this week.

Musk’s recent sales shrink his stake in the company to roughly 13 per cent, according to Bloomberg data. Musk, who has been Tesla’s CEO since 2008, is still the largest shareholder. As of Wednesday’s close, he was worth $160.9 billion, ranking number two on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index after France’s Bernard Arnault. His fortune has dropped by $109.4 billion this year. – Bloomberg