Elon Musk sells US$6.9 billion worth of Tesla stock to prepare if "Twitter forces this deal"

The Twitter vs Musk showdown is in full swing. Earlier, we reported that Twitter had slammed Musk’s use of a publicly available bot detection tool to quantify bot accounts on the social media site. The court battle between the two sides will take place starting on October 5. Now, to prepare for a potential loss in court, Musk has sold 7.92 million shares of EV maker Tesla to finance the US$44 billion Twitter deal that he had previously abandoned.

Per the SEC filings, Musk sold the shares for a total of US$6.88 billion between August 5 and 9. The CEO explained his decision to offload the shares on Twitter, “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 further added that he was done selling Tesla stock and he will buy them back if the Twitter buyout doesn’t go through.

This is not the first time that Musk has dipped into his stockpile of Tesla shares. The SpaceX CEO previously sold shares worth US$8.5 billion in April. Reuters notes that, combined with the latest sale, Musk has offloaded around US$32 billion worth of Tesla stock in less than one year.

Buy Tesla Motors 24' cable wall connector on Amazon