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Elon Musk Amasses $7.14 Billion for Twitter Purchase

Photo by @brett_jordan via unsplash

Elon Musk Amasses $7.14 Billion for Twitter Purchase

By Movieguide® Contributor

Elon Musk is calling on some of his billionaire buddies to help gather the funds for his Twitter purchase. 

Musk currently has $7.14 billion in funding, including $1 billion from pal Larry Ellison. Ellison co-founded software company Oracle, and sits on the Tesla board with Musk. 

According to Variety, Musk “will continue to have discussions with certain existing holders” of Twitter stock. Some, like Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, will retain their shares. Others, like ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, might contribute their shares in the social media app towards Musk’s bid. 

In addition to Ellison’s billion, Musk received $800 million from venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital, $500 million from cryptocurrency exchange Binance.com, and $400 million from a16z, the VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

He is expected to take over as interim CEO of Twitter once the deal closes, but according to a Reuters report, Musk has already chosen a permanent CEO to replace him. 

Movieguide® previously reported on Musk’s purchase of the social media platform:

Elon Musk is set to buy out Twitter after, moving the company from a publicly traded entity to privately held. The announcement comes after Musk bought a controlling share in the company in early April. Musk cites the First Amendment of the right to free speech as his reasoning.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

Musk previously polled the platform’s users, asking if they felt Twitter adhered to free speech principles. The majority of respondents – 70%- voted no.

After news broke Monday, Musk tweeted, “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”

The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.