The good news for Elon Musk is that he gained control of the rudderless Twitter social media app, what he refers to as the “town square of our time: and who knows, maybe one day it will become a trillion-dollar company. The bad news for Musk appears to be that he paid a steep price for it, and it sounds like he regrets the amount of Twitter stock he cashed in for the purchase.
He sold at least $30 billion worth of stock to help finance the $44 billion sales tag.
In April, he sold $8.5 billion worth of shares, another $6.9 billion in August, and $3.95 billion in November, and he capped off the year by dumping $3.6 billion worth of stock in December.
What that means for his overall ownership stake is that he now controls roughly 13% of the company Bloomberg reported.
Musk revealed his regrets in a thread on Twitter, commenting on a post by someone who said, “Haha, I still can’t believe Elon bought Twitter.”
Musk followed with, “Me neither.” A few minutes later, he added. “Sucks that I had to sell so much Tesla stock to do so (sigh).”
After that selling spree, Musk promised that he was going to hold on to his Twitter shares for a while.
“I won’t sell stock until — I don’t know — probably two years from now, definitely not next year under any circumstances, and probably not the year thereafter.”
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