Billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he was joking about his tweet about buying Premier League soccer club Manchester United.
“No, this is a long-running joke on Twitter. I will not buy any sports team,” wrote Musk, when asked by a user about the seriousness of buying the club.
Earlier, Musk said he would buy Manchester United, the English Premier League football club.
Also, I’m buying Manchester United ur welcome
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 17, 2022
“I’m going to buy Manchester United,” Musk wrote on his Twitter account.
It was not clear how serious Musk was in completing the deal.
Musk sold $6.9 billion in Tesla shares, according to regulatory filings published on Tuesday, the first time he has sold shares in the automaker since he gave up his bid to buy Twitter.
The Tesla CEO dumped the shares on August 5, according to new filings. Musk has now sold $32 billion worth of stock in the electric car company in the past 10 months. The purpose of the recent sale was not clear.
Tesla shares plunged late last year as Musk sold more than $16 billion in shares, his first sale in more than 5 years. The deals began in November after Musk polled his Twitter followers on whether he should reduce his stake.
It is noteworthy that Tesla shares rose about 35% from their recent lows in May.
Musk’s fortune is $250.2 billion, which puts him at the top of the list of the world’s richest people, according to the “Bloomberg Billionaires Index”, although his wealth has declined by $20 billion this year.
Musk said last month that he had terminated his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter and make it private, saying the company had made “misleading representations” about the number of spam bots on the platform. Twitter has since filed a lawsuit to force Musk to complete the deal, and a trial date in Delaware court has been set for October.
Over the weekend, Musk tweeted that if Twitter offered a way to sample accounts to determine how many bots were confirmed to be real, “the deal should continue on original terms.”
In May, Musk dropped plans to partially fund the purchase with a marginal loan tied to his stake in Tesla, and increased the size of the equity component of the deal to $33.5 billion. It previously announced that it had secured $7.1 billion in equity commitments from investors including billionaire Larry Ellison, Sequoia Capital and Binance.