Bloomberg News diagnosed on the 15th (local time) that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s recent stock disposal is related to Twitter’s financial problems.
Musk announced that he had sold 3.58 billion dollars (4.7 trillion won) worth of Tesla shares the day before.
According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk sold 22 million shares of Tesla stock in three days from the 12th.
Bloomberg analyzed that “Even following Musk repeatedly affirmed that the sale of Tesla stock was over, he continued to sell shares,” and “this reflects growing financial pressure on Twitter.”
Musk posted a post on Twitter at the end of April and said that he had no plans to sell additional Tesla shares, and in August, following abruptly breaking the contract to acquire Twitter, he declared that the sale of stocks to finance the acquisition was over.
However, when Musk acquired Twitter following a legal battle, he sold Tesla shares to raise $15.4 billion in cash, and early last month, a few days following signing the acquisition contract, he sold an additional $3.95 billion worth of Tesla shares.
Bloomberg pointed out that “Musk’s whimsical and impulsive approach to social media management has led to the departure of advertisers” over Twitter’s financial problems. Then, they tried to increase sales by introducing ‘Twitter Blue’, a paid authentication service that confirms the authenticity of user accounts, but only controversy arose and it was diagnosed that it had an adverse effect.
When Musk acquired Twitter, he also took on a significant amount of high-interest loans to Twitter by using a leveraged buyout (LBO) method. Twitter debt has increased more than 7 times from $ 1.7 billion to $ 13 billion, Bloomberg reported that the amount of interest to be paid additionally per year is approaching $ 1.2 billion.
“It’s not a good situation,” said Tony Sycamore, an analyst at IG Markets, an investment information company.
