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Elon Musk is getting help from more than a dozen additional names as he looks to buy Twitter Inc.
The Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
chief disclosed in a Thursday morning filing that he had obtained new financing commitments worth $7.139 billion in aggregate to support his pending acquisition of Twitter
TWTR,
for $54.20 a share, or about $44 billion.
The investors include Oracle Corp.
ORCL,
co-founder Larry Ellison’s revocable trust, which is committing $1 billion. Sequoia Capital Fund has agreed to kick in $800 million, while cryptocurrency platform Binance has agreed to contribute $500 million.
Additionally, Musk disclosed in the filing that Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud of Saudi Arabia has committed to contribute about 35 million Twitter shares so that he can retain an equity investment in the social-media company upon completion of the merger.
While Musk had originally pointed to $12.5 billion in commitments for margin-loan funding in an April filing, his disclosures this week indicated that the margin loan has been cut back to a $6.25 billion aggregate principal amount. Musk also provided an equity commitment letter in April pointing to $21 billion in financing commitments associated with his bid, but the latest filing raised the commitment amount to $27.25 billion.
Twitter’s board of directors accepted Musk’s bid to buy the company in an April 25 agreement. The deal is subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals.
Opinion: It looks like nothing will stop Elon Musk from owning Twitter
Musk, a Twitter power user, has been critical of the platform’s approach to content moderation and has floated several new features that the service could potentially introduce under his ownership. Musk teased the possibility of end-to-end encryption for direct messages, a “slight cost” for commercial and government users of the service, and authentication of “all real humans.”
Twitter shares were ahead 1.9% in premarket trading, which would indicate a stock price of $49.97 if those gains are reflected at the open. Shares of Tesla were down 0.4% premarket.
