Elon Musk has named 18 investors including Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud as committed investors to contribute $7 billion to his Twitter takeover bid.
This is even as indications emerged that Musk will serve as CEO of Twitter for a few months when his $44 billion deal goes through.
Prince Alwaleed, who initially tried to block Musk’s Twitter buyout, took to the platform Thursday to give a strong endorsement for the Tesla CEO. The Saudi Arabian royal, who is a major shareholder in the tech giant, rejected the SpaceX founder’s $41 billion offer to purchase the platform in mid-April, alleging the amount was not ‘close to the intrinsic value of Twitter given its growth prospects’
SEC filling
In a filing on Thursday, Musk said his friend, the Oracle Corp co-founder, Larry Ellison’s trust will invest $1 billion towards the $44 billion buyout. Musk said he had also received equity commitment letters from investors including Sequoia Capital ($800million) and Brookfield ($250million) for the financing of $7.14 billion.
Other investors listed included Qatari Holding ($375million) and NYC real estate investor Steve Witkoff ($100million). The filing also listed Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud as having committed 34,948,975 Twitter Inc shares.
What the investors are saying
One of the investors, Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, tweeted about the investment. He said: “Elon is the one person we know and perhaps the only person in the world who has the courage, brilliance, and skills to fix all of these and build the public square that we all hoped for and deserve.”
“We invested because we believe in Ev and Jack’s vision to connect the world and we believe in Elon’s brilliance to finally make it what it was meant to be. 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,” he added.
- The billionaire will continue to hold talks with existing shareholders of Twitter – including former chief Jack Dorsey – to contribute shares to the proposed acquisition.
- It was reported last week he was in talks with large investment firms and high net-worth individuals about taking on more financing for his Twitter acquisition and tying up less of his wealth in the deal.
