After the $44 billion purchase of Twitter went official, Elon Musk seems to have started pulling strings to get some of the money meant to complete the transaction. South African tycoon sold about 4.4 million Tesla shares this weekaccording to regulations published by the electric vehicle manufacturing firm.
Thus, the businessman pocketed an amount of about $4 billion. The sale was made between Tuesday, April 26, and Wednesday, April 27, that is, within 48 hours after it was announced that Musk would lead Twitter. According to regulators, the shares traded at prices ranging from $870 to nearly $1,000.
The data, of course, did not go unnoticed. In fact, Elon Musk himself tweeted last night that “I didn’t plan any more sales after today”; somewhat ambiguous, and that could leave the door open for him to give up most of his stake in Tesla, which – if so – should be reported within Friday.
as assembled bloombergElon Musk has sold over $20 billion of Tesla shares in the past six months. This is due to the fact that at the end of 2021, about $16 billion were sold. Despite this, owns more than 168 million shares of an electric vehicle company.worth over $147.5 billion.
Why is Elon Musk selling his Tesla shares?
Although the specific reasons are not publicly disclosed, the sale of Tesla shares will be linked to the purchase of Twitter. As we mentioned at the beginning, Elon Musk has yet to receive some of the money earmarked for the acquisition of the social network, and this is not a minor figure.
The tycoon has submitted $46,500 million in funding to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to complete the acquisition. Of this total, 21 billion in cash guaranteed by Musk himselfand losing part of his stake in Tesla seems like the quickest way to get at least some of that money.
However, this may not be the only way Elon Musk has chosen to get liquidity. The fact is that selling your Tesla shares obliges you to pay exorbitant amounts of taxes, which has already caused controversy in the past.
In accordance with Reuters, Tesla’s CEO was “inundated with offers from potential shareholders” to join him in buying Twitter. And while he is expected to decide in the coming weeks whether he will accept any of these offers, the same medium indicates that unlikely to do. Why? Because the deal was not structured like a traditional leveraged buyout.
In addition to the $21 billion that Elon Musk provided out of his own pocket, the rest of the funding comes from two loans. One, in the amount of $13,000 million against social media assets; the other is $12.5 billion backed by the $62.5 billion Tesla shares it owns. They were provided by financial institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, among others.
how to make money with twitter
Elon Musk assured banks that he could make money on Twitter. To do this, he will evaluate several options, from cutting costs through the dissolution of the board of directors and possible layoffs to to monetize tweets. Regarding the last point, one of his ideas would be to charge a fee when a third party website wants to quote or embed tweets from a person or organization whose account is verified.
As for staff cuts, the measure is already causing concern among social network employees. Parag Agrawal, the company’s current CEO, said this week that there are no immediate plans in this regard; However, he was unable to elaborate on what would happen when Elon Musk’s purchase was completed.
There is also a lot of uncertainty about who will be the next CEO. Agrawal indicated that he would remain in the position until the trade closed; Reutersmeanwhile ensures that the new owner he has already chosen his successorbut this still preserves his anonymity.
Source: Hiper Textual
