Elon Musk sells $6.9bn of Tesla shares, first since April

Elon Musk sold $6.9bn of shares in Tesla, according to regulatory filings on August 9, the first time he has sold stock in the carmaker since dropping his bid to buy Twitter.

Tesla’s CEO offloaded the shares on August 5, according to the new filings. Musk has now sold around $32bn worth of stock in the electric-car maker in the past 10 months. The purpose of the latest sales wasn’t immediately clear.

Tesla’s stock slumped late last year as Musk offloaded more than $16bn worth of shares, his first sales in more than five years. The disposals started in November after Musk polled Twitter users on whether he should trim his stake.

The shares have risen about 35 per cent from their recent lows in May.

With a $250.2bn fortune, Musk is the world’s richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth has fallen $20bn this year as Tesla shares fell from around $1,200 at the start of the year.

Musk last month said he’s terminating his $44bn agreement to acquire Twitter and take it private, saying the company has made “misleading representations” over the number of spam bots on the service. Twitter has since sued to force Musk to consummate the deal, and a trial in the Delaware Chancery Court has been set for October.

Read: Musk backs out of $44bn Twitter deal over bot accounts

On the weekend, Musk tweeted that if Twitter provided its method of sampling accounts to determine the number of bots how they are confirmed to be real, “the deal should proceed on original terms.”

In May, Musk dropped plans to partially fund the purchase with a margin loan tied to his Tesla stake and increased the size of the equity component of the deal to $33.5bn. He had previously announced that he secured $7.1bn of equity commitments from investors including billionaire Larry Ellison, Sequoia Capital and Binance.