United States: Mr. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has declared that he won’t sell any more of his company’s stock for two years.
The company’s founder, Mr. Musk, stated that a “serious recession” is expected to hit the economy next year while speaking in a Twitter Spaces audio chat. Tesla’s board is open to the possibility of a share buyback but that will depend on how bad the recession is, the CEO observed.
The billionaire, who also controls Twitter and SpaceX, had made a commitment to refrain from selling any more Tesla stock before breaking that promise. In April, he sold roughly $4 billion of Tesla shares before saying there would be “no further sales planned after today”, but he sold large amounts of shares a number of times since then.
Mr. Musk revealed more stock sales worth $3.6 billion last week. “I needed to sell some stock to make sure, like, there’s powder dry…to account for a worst-case scenario,” the Twitter head remarked.
Investor worries that Mr. Musk has been consumed by Twitter events since he took over the social media company in October 2022 have contributed to the nearly 70 percent decline in Tesla shares so far this year. Despite this, Mr. Musk argued that running Twitter is quite straightforward, saying it is “maybe 10 percent of the complexity of Tesla.”
Twitter was purchased by Mr. Musk for $44 billion with the intention of enhancing free speech and removing phoney accounts, but the journey has not been smooth. As concerns mount about the platform’s direction and about its capacity to pay interest on the $13 billion debt Mr. Musk took on to buy it, he has made a number of contentious policy decisions, and many significant advertisers have left the platform.
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