Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold 19.5 million shares in a transaction valued at $3.95 billion.
Musk’s move comes after buying Twitter for $44 billion. He has sold about $20 billion worth of Tesla stock since he first invested in Twitter in April.
“In the event that Twitter forces this deal to close, and if some of the partners fail to do so, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock,” he wrote on Twitter.
Musk, who is the world’s richest man, now owns about 135 million shares in Tesla. The sale came just weeks after Tesla reported $3.3 billion in profit and $21.45 billion in revenue for the third quarter.
Tesla’s value has fallen about 46 percent this year, but Musk’s net worth remains just under $200 billion.
The billionaire had pledged to fund the Twitter acquisition himself, but continued to receive backing in the form of $7 billion from investors including Oracle’s Larry Ellison and cryptocurrency platform Binance.
A consortium of banks also borrowed $13 billion to finance the deal. After completing the acquisition of the social network, Musk fired the CEO and several senior executives, before laying off half of the company’s workforce.
In the early days of the acquisition, there were reports that the company sought to re-hire some employees after realizing their roles were needed to keep the platform running or implement some of Musk’s proposed changes.