Elon Musk Tweets That He's 'Buying Manchester United,' Shares Spike

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Shares for Manchester United briefly spiked after billionaire Elon Musk jokingly tweeted that he was buying the struggling English Premier League club.

Manchester United went up as high as 17% in premarket trading Wednesday (August 17), according to CNBC, hours after Musk, the richest person in the world, posted, "Also, I'm buying Manchester United ur welcome," just three days after the club's 4-0 upset loss to Brentford.

Musk later clarified that he was joking about the purchase, calling it a "long-running joke on Twitter" and reiterating that he had no plans of "buying any sports teams."

"Although, if it were any team, it would be Man U," Musk added. "They were my fav team as a kid."

Earlier this month, Musk sold 7.92 million shares of Tesla stock valued at around $6.88 billion in the days after the company's 2022 annual shareholder meeting, according to a series of financial filings obtained by NBC News on August 9.

The SEC filings state that the transactions took place between August 5 and 9. Tesla's annual shareholder meeting was held in Austin, Texas on August 4.

Musk had previously claimed that he had "no further TSLA sales planned after today" in a tweet shared on April 28.

SEC filings at the time revealed that Musk -- who Forbes lists as the world's richest billionaire with a net value of $255.1 billion -- had been selling block shares in the company worth about $8.4 million.

Musk's recent selling of Tesla shares comes amid his legal battle with Twitter after initially agreeing to buy the social media giant for about $44 billion ($54.20 per share) in April, then pulling out of the deal in July.

Musk claims Twitter failed to provide him with enough information at the time of the acquisition, as well as understating the number of bots, spam and fake accounts present on its website.

Twitter's share price dropped after Musk's reported purchase, as did the price of Tesla shares following an overall market decline.


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