Elon Musk sells yet another $3.58 billion of Tesla shares

Elon Musk has sold another $3.5 billion in Tesla shares, according to a form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. Since November 2021, the high point of Tesla’s share price, Musk has sold more than $39 billion of shares, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Musk, who recently lost the title of being the world’s richest man, last filed with the SEC about Tesla share sales in November, when he sold $3.4 billion. Before that, he sold $8.4 billion in April and $6.9 billion (nice) in August. He said he was done selling twice, once in April and once in August.

Musk has been running his social media site, Twitter, into the ground after closing the deal to acquire the company on Oct. 28th. Advertisers have fled the company, and in November, visits to Twitter’s ad manager fell 85 percent from the year before, The Wall Street Journal reported. In its last year as a public company, 89 percent of Twitter’s revenue came from advertising. Twitter has stopped paying rent on some of its office space and stiffed travel vendors. The troubled company has already undergone several waves of employee layoffs.

Twitter will have to pay about $1 billion a year in debt as part of the buyout, and some of the banks that made the loans are preparing to book losses on that debt this quarter. One way for Musk to avoid ugliness is to personally pay Twitter’s debt.

Musk has often tapped into his fandom, using his Twitter account to rally retail investors. He’s wooed those investors — and in 2018, he introduced ways for them to ask questions during his earnings calls. At the end of the day today, shares of Tesla closed at $156.80, which The Wall Street Journal says is the lowest level in more than two years.