The move comes after it bought Twitter for $44 billion. Musk has sold nearly $20 billion of his Tesla stock since he first invested in the social networking company in April. In August, before Twitter’s legal action finally sealed the takeover deal, Musk claimed he was done selling stock. “In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close and certain equity partners don’t materialize, it’s important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock,” he tweeted. Musk, the world’s richest man, now owns about 135 million Tesla shares. The sale came just weeks after Tesla reported a profit of $3.3 billion and revenue of $21.45 billion for the third quarter — missing Wall Street expectations — that sent shares down 4 percent on the day. Tesla’s value has fallen about 46% this year, but Musk’s net worth remains just under $200 billion. Musk admitted at the time of the results that he was “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now.” Musk had pledged to fund the acquisition himself, but continued to receive $7 billion in backing from investors including Larry Ellison, founder of software group Oracle, and cryptocurrency platform Binance. A consortium of banks also lent $13 billion to finance the deal. After the acquisition was completed, Musk fired the CEO and several top executives, before laying off up to half the company’s workforce. In the chaotic days since, there have been reports that the company tried to rehire some employees after realizing their roles were necessary to keep the site running or to implement some of Musk’s proposed changes to the platform. Musk originally planned to charge $20 a month to apply a blue tick to user accounts, in a twist on the verification system. Now the fee has been reduced to $8 per month, with select verified accounts marked on their profiles as ‘official’. The company delayed introducing the change to verification until after the US midterm elections.
