Elon Musk needed help from his billionaire friends. The boss of Tesla has raised 7 million dollars to buy the social network Twitter.
Despite an estimated net worth of over $200 billion, the world’s richest man is soliciting funds from his billionaire and multi-billionaire friends to complete his takeover of Twitter.
On Thursday, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk raised $7.1 billion in funding from Oracle co-founder and Tesla board member Larry Ellison, a Qatar-owned investment house by sovereign wealth fund, leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Silicon Valley VC firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, and 14 others, according to a recent SEC filing.
One such financier, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, has a large stake in Twitter and has agreed to pledge his $1.9 billion in shares of the social media company.
Elon Musk appears unwilling to borrow more against his Tesla stock after initially planning to pledge $62.5 billion of stock as collateral for the loans, and he has said he will not offload any more Tesla stock after he already sold nearly 10 million.
Musk also reportedly spoke with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey amid his fundraising campaign. Musk’s public relations team did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.
Last month, Twitter’s 11-member board agreed to sell the platform to Musk, who was revealed as the company’s largest shareholder in early April, for $44 billion.
Ahead of the bid, Musk is a free speech activist and has criticized Twitter management’s content moderation policies. He has signaled that his interest in Twitter is purely ideological while showing little public interest in the company’s profitability.
“Twitter will still be free for casual users, but perhaps a small cost for commercial/government users“, he wrote in a tweet. Likewise, in Musk’s conversations with potential investors, he flirted with the idea of taking Twitter public again in a few years, according to a Wall Street Journal report this week.
On Thursday, CNBC reported that Musk will likely take on the role of Twitter’s temporary CEO once the takeover is complete, replacing current CEO Parag Agrawal.
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