bitchy | Elon Musk sold off $6.9 billion worth of Tesla stock ahead of the Twitter court case

The more I hear about the “court of chancery” in Delaware, it sounds like Elon Musk is about to get his broke ass handed to him. To summarize, Elon Musk thought it would be super-cool to own Twitter so he made a very high bid on the company to purchase it as-is, with zero due diligence. Twitter agreed to the sale and then Musk spent months trying to back out of the sale. Now Twitter is taking him to court… the court of chancery. The trial is set for October and the chances are very good that Musk will be given a choice: he will be forced to honor his signed contract to purchase Twitter, or he will have to pay Twitter and Twitter shareholders billions for wasting their time. Musk apparently knows it’s going to be bad. He’s already selling off billions of Tesla stock.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold 7.9 million shares of Tesla in recent days, raising $6.9 billion with the sales. The sales from Friday through Tuesday were disclosed in a series of filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Tuesday night. They mark the first sale of Tesla shares by Musk since April, when he sold 9.6 million shares, raising $8.5 billion at that time.

Those April sales came soon after Musk had reached a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. But a month ago he announced that he does not plan to go through with that deal, arguing that Twitter management did not disclose material information about how many user accounts were bots and spam accounts rather than accounts run by actual people. Twitter (TWTR) quickly sued to force Musk to go ahead with the deal on the terms reached in April.

Musk’s filings did not disclose the reason for the stock sales. But after someone on Twitter asked him if he was done selling Tesla shares, he responded “Yes” and then pointed to the possibility of being forced to buy Twitter as the reason for this latest sale.

“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,” he said in his tweet. But at the time he sold the Tesla (TSLA) shares in April, he tweeted “No further TSLA sales planned after today.”

[From CNN]

Gizmodo pointed out that Musk only offloaded billions in Tesla stock after Tesla’s stock price recovered from a “brutal downturn” several months ago. Gizmodo also points out that Twitter has all of their legal ducks in a row, and their most recent filing to the court of chancery effectively “obliterated” Musk’s broke-ass excuses for why he pulled out of the deal. It sounds like Musk knows he’s about to get reamed in the court of chancery. Unless something else is going on and Musk just needs billions to start some new grift or Ponzi scheme.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.