Tesla chief exec Elon Musk has offloaded $3.4 billion in Tesla shares, forms filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission have revealed.

The news, spotted by The Verge, means that the world’s richest man has sold almost $20 billion in Tesla stock this year. The mass sale of stock has mostly gone to finance Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of social media platform Twitter.

The billionaire sold $8.4 billion in April followed by a further $6.9 billion in August. Following each of those sales, Musk had tweeted that he had no plans to sell additional stocks.

Musk however is facing a tricky situation at the social media site following his proclamation that “comedy is now legal on Twitter.” The exec’s lax approach to moderation (except for accounts parodying him) has seen the already unprofitable platform lose high profile advertisers such as Audi, Carlsberg and United Airlines all pull their ad spend on the platform.

The already unprofitable site will also have to pay around $1 billion per year in interest on the $12.7 billion debt Musk took out in order to buy Twitter.

The news came shortly after Tesla recalled over 40,000 cars in the US due to a potential power-steering problem.

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