by Elon Musk has secured $7.1 billion in funding for his acquisition of Twitter -the acquisition CNBC says will also include taking on the position as ” temporary CEO” -the latest round of financing being provided by a variety of investors who are often high-profile outside investors.
The highest on this list will be Larry Ellison, with the co-founder and CTO of Oracle committed to $1 billion for the acquisition.
Ellison has claimed that he’s “very close friends” with Musk Ellison was included on the Tesla board in 2018. Being one of the most wealthy individuals alive, an adjective he shares with Musk and has an approximate net worth of $100 billion, this investment is not much for Ellison. In 2012 Ellison acquired most of the Hawaiian island Lanai for $500 million.
The list of new investors includes venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, the financial firm Fidelity and the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, and Qatar’s state-owned investment firm. Qatar.
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal also agreed to stay invested in Twitter following the merger’s conclusion despite initially stating Musk’s offer didn’t “[come] close to the intrinsic value of Twitter” and saying that he would not accept the purchase. When the merger concludes, and he can sell his $1.9 billion stakes in Twitter will be converted to become an investment in the privately-owned company.
The prince tweeted to his “new” friend Elon: “I believe you will be an excellent leader for Twitter to propel & maximize its great potential.” Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao told the Financial Times that the $500 million buy-ins were “more of a blank check” instead of an investment based on particular plans.
3/While Twitter has great promise as a public square, it suffers from a myriad of difficult issues ranging from bots to abuse to censorship. Being a public company solely reliant on an advertising business model exacerbates all of these.
— benahorowitz.eth (@bhorowitz) May 5, 2022
Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz posted several tweets on why his company will invest $400 million in the company and criticized unidentified instances of censorship. He also said, “we believe in Ev and Jack’s vision to connect the world and Elon’s brilliance to make it what it was meant to be final.”
Horowitz blamed some of the issues in part on Twitter having a status of a publicly-traded business that relies on advertising. It also received an endorsement from its co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, whom he wrote on Twitter, “this is what it is. It’s going to need a cover for a time.”
Musk reached an arrangement with Twitter to make the company public for $44 billion last week. The new financing permits Musk to make fewer commitments of his wealth to the deal, which could be beneficial since most of that money is tied to Tesla shares.
The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of the year. Musk has offered vague and sometimes extravagant details on how he’ll alter Twitter from “authenticating all humans” to moving away from advertising. He’s mostly said that it’s his intention for the platform to be a place to allow free speech, but it’s not clear what that means in the real world.
Musk has also stated that purchasing Twitter ” is not a way to make money.” But he’s believed to be contemplating cutting jobs in addition to charging governments and businesses to use the service.
