Shillong, September 6: Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, reportedly borrowed $1 billion from his space company SpaceX in October of the previous year, coinciding with his acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion.
As per IANS, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk sought a $1 billion loan from SpaceX “around the time he was acquiring the social-media company formerly known as Twitter.”
In October, SpaceX granted approval for the $1 billion loan, and Musk “drew all of it down the same month,” according to documents cited in the report.
The report also highlighted that SpaceX has extended loans to Musk on multiple occasions in recent years.
Neither SpaceX nor X (formerly Twitter) immediately responded to this report.
In April of the previous year, Twitter had announced that it had entered into an agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Musk, at a price of $54.20 per share in cash, valuing the transaction at around $44 billion. This price represented a 38 percent premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Musk disclosed his approximately 9 percent stake in Twitter.
After a period of intense negotiations, Musk eventually completed the acquisition in October, securing funds from banks and a select group of wealthy acquaintances.
Ultimately, Musk abandoned the borrowing plan and contributed more of his own cash to the acquisition. He ended up selling approximately $15.5 billion worth of Tesla shares in two phases and personally covering a transaction totaling just over $27 billion in cash.
As part of the agreement, Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, provided a $1 billion contribution, in addition to the $5.2 billion from investment organizations and other substantial funds. The Qatar Investment Authority, which oversees Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, Qatar Holding, also made a financial contribution.
Nearly $13 billion of the remaining funds were secured through bank loans, including those from Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and others.