Ford North America Production Communications director Mike Levine has trolled Elon Musk for selling $6.9 billion worth of Tesla shares.
The eccentric chief executive of Tesla started selling Tesla shares on Friday, eventually offloading some 7.92 million shares. He took to Twitter to confirm he was selling in the event that a judge in the Delaware Chancery Court decides that he needs to follow through with his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, despite his attempts to pull out of the deal.
“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 wrote on Twitter.
How it started How it’s going pic.twitter.com/QyUz6HR7ZW
— Mike Levine (@mrlevine) August 10, 2022
Levine quickly took to Twitter to poke fun at Musk, sharing a screenshot of a tweet that Musk made in late April when he said “No further TSLA sales planned after today.” This came after he sold about $8.5 billion in Tesla shares to help fund his acquisition of Twitter.
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When the deal was first announced, Musk said he would purchase Twitter with approximately $33.5 billion in cash, alongside $13 billion in debt financing. The cash would come through a combination of his own funds and money from outside investors, including the likes of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Larry Ellison to the tune of $7.1 billion. Also set to provide funding were cryptocurrency companies, sovereign wealth funds, property firms, mutual funds, and family offices, The New York Times reports.
Most legal analysts believe that Twitter is in a stronger position to force the deal to go through that Musk is to try and avoid going through with the deal through a provision of the contract known as “specific performance.”
“The [stock] sales make clear he intends to honor court orders,” Tulane Law School professor of corporate governance Ann M. Lipton said.