To finance the acquisition of Twitter , the businessman Elon Musk said he had 21,000 million dollars of his personal fortune. The rest will be financed with a bank loan.
Tesla owner Elon Musk sold $4.4 billion worth of shares in his electric car company shortly after he bought Twitter .
The sale occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to documents filed Thursday with the US markets regulator, the SEC.
Following the sale, Musk owns just over 168 million shares of Tesla, through a trust. “No further planned sales of TSLA (Tesla stock symbol) after today,” Musk tweeted late Thursday. To finance his acquisition of Twitter, confirmed Monday, Musk said he had $21 billion of his personal fortune. The rest will be financed with a bank loan.
Many investors and analysts have expressed doubts about whether the deal will go through. Twitter shares are trading at a price significantly lower than Musk’s offer of $54.20 per share. On Thursday, it closed at $49.11 on Wall Street.
The market usually interprets the difference between the offer price and the value of a share as the risk premium, that is, the measure of the risk that the acquisition represents.
Progressive Twitter accounts lose followers, conservatives gain
Key figures on the American left, including former President Barack Obama, have lost thousands of followers since Elon Musk’s plans to acquire Twitter surfaced, while right-wing politicians have regained adherents. Musk, the world’s richest man, reached a deal on Monday to buy the US-based social media platform for $44 billion.