Early Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who once said he’d defend the company like one of his children, now ‘hates’ the stock (TWTR)

Chris Sacca, one of Twitter’s first investors, was once so emotionally attached to the company that he felt it “was one of my children and I needed to defend it at all costs.”

Now Sacca has completely given up on the stock and sold all of his shares, he revealed in a series of tweets on Tuesday.

“I haven’t owned TWTR for almost a couple years,” Sacca, the billionaire venture capitalist who has also made investments in Uber and Instagram, tweeted to his 1.8 million followers.

“When they failed to get Ev involved again, I lost hope. Love the service, hate the stock,” he said, referring to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.

In a follow-up tweet, Sacca clarified that his fund sold “most” of its shares after Jack Dorsey, another Twitter cofounder, was brought back on as Twitter’s CEO in October 2015, and that he sold his personal shares in the fall of 2016.

Sacca’s change of heart reflects the broader market’s disillusionment with Twitter, which has seen its stock plunge roughly 80% from its peak shortly after its IPO in 2013. But the fact that such an ardent support of the company has thrown in the towel shows just how hard Twitter will have to work to rejuvenate its struggling business.

In an email to Business Insider on Tuesday, Sacca said the fact that he sold his stake in Twitter was not news and that he had publicly discussed it multiple times. He said he had nothing further to add about his views on the stock.

‘I’m not an idiot’

As recently as October, in an interview with Bloomberg, Sacca he didn’t own as many Twitter shares “as I used to because I’m not an idiot, but I [still] own more than I should because I’m an idiot.”

But if Sacca is feeling less optimistic about Twitter these days, it’s for good reason.

“I believe without reservation that Twitter can soon evolve to be used by over 500 million people a month,” he wrote in a May 2015 post about Twitter titled “I bleed aqua.”

Twitter’s number of monthly users at the time Sacca wrote the hopeful post totaled 302 million. Nearly two years later, Twitter’s audience has barely budged, reaching 319 million monthly users last quarter.

Here are a few more of Sacca’s tweets about Twitter on Tuesday, including how he thinks the company needs to open its platform back up to developers and tackle its “bot epidemic:”

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