Elon Musk sells nearly USD 7 billion worth of Tesla shares amid Twitter legal battle

Washington, Aug 10: Elon Musk sold USD 7 billion worth shares of Tesla in recent days amid uncertainty over the fate of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter Inc.

Musk, Tesla's chief executive and largest shareholder, sold around 7.9 million shares between between Aug 5 and 9, the disclosures show, leaving him with a 15% stake in the company.

The sale comes just four months after the world's richest person said he had no further plans to sell Tesla shares after disposing of $8.5 billion of stock in the wake of his now-pulled deal to buy Twitter Inc.

Musk has now sold around USD 32 billion worth of stock in Tesla over the past 10 months. However, the purpose of the latest sales wasn't immediately clear.

Musk has since then tried to walk away from buying Twitter, which is suing him to enforce the takeover. The case is headed to court in October.

Earlier this year, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO decided to suspend the Twitter deal due to multiple breaches of the purchase agreement.

In April, Musk reached an acquisition agreement with Twitter at $54.20 per share in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. However, Musk put the deal on hold in May to allow his team to review the veracity of Twitter's claim that less than 5 per cent of accounts on the platform are bots or spam.

Back in June, Musk had openly accused the microblogging website of breaching the merger agreement and threatened to walk away and call off the acquisition of the social media company for not providing the data he has requested on spam and fake accounts.