Elon Musk Sells Nearly $7 Billion Of Tesla Shares

The deal should proceed on original terms, says Musk

Ahead of the battle of the Twitter deal worth $44 Billion, Elon Musk has sold nearly $7 billion worth of Tesla shares, according to legal filings published Tuesday.

As per the legal files, Tesla owner Musk sold some 7.9 million shares between August 5 and 9, according to filings published on the Securities and Exchange Commission's website.

"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, the world's richest man, wrote on Twitter.

Taking notes from the Twitter deal, Twitter is locked in a legal battle with the mercurial Tesla boss over his effort to walk away from the April agreement to buy the company, and a judge has ordered that a trial will begin in October.

Musk has filed a countersuit, accusing Twitter of fraud and alleging the social media platform misled him about key aspects of its business before he agreed to a $44 billion buyout.

The move comes after Musk sold around $8.5 billion worth of shares in the electric carmaker in April as he was preparing to finance the Twitter deal. He tweeted at the time: "No further TSLA sales planned after today."

In his tweets late Tuesday, Musk said the stock sale was also to contingency for if those private investors don't come through.

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