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Musk received $ 7 billion support for Twitter bid from tech giants



Billionaire Elon Musk bolstered his stake in the bid to buy Twitter, with more than $7 billion in commitments from various investors, including key Silicon Valley names like Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

Thursday’s filing also noted that Musk is in ongoing talks with other parties, including former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who is the company’s second-largest individual stakeholder after Musk.

Other investors include Sequoia Capital Fund, which has pledged $800 million, and VyCapital, which has pledged $700 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. However, Ellison, who is also a Tesla board member, is the biggest contributor with $1 billion.

Tech venture capitalist Ben Horowitz said his firm, known as Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, has invested $400 million because he believes in Musk’s “genius that will finally make it the way it’s meant to be.”

“While Twitter has great promise as a public square, it suffers from a myriad of tough problems, from bots to abuse to censorship,” Horowitz said on Twitter on Thursday. “Being a public company based solely on an advertising business model makes all this worse.”

According to the filing, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud pledged 35 million shares on Twitter to support Musk.

In previous regulatory filings, Musk revealed that he sold approximately $8.5 billion of shares in Tesla to help fund the acquisition. Musk later tweeted that the company is not planning any further sales of its shares, meaning it will need outside commitments to fund the $44 billion deal.

Due to the new fund listed in its SEC filing on Thursday, Musk will cut in half his $12.5 billion margin loan against Tesla shares to $6.25 billion. The transaction is also currently funded with cash and equity, ranging from $21 billion to $27.25 billion.

Shares of Twitter Inc. fell short of Musk’s $54.20 per share bid because there are still doubts on Wall Street about whether the deal will materialize.

The new round of funding brought the price of Tesla shares closer to what Musk paid, and the stock jumped almost 4% to $50.85 on the opening bell.

“In this high-stakes poker game, Ellison and his impressive list of supporters will lift more bulge from Tesla stock as Musk’s share leverage now becomes less burdensome,” wrote Dan Ives, analyst who follows Twitter for Wedbush. “This was a smart financial and strategic move by Musk that would be well received by the board and also show that the Twitter deal is now on a slide to end.”





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