$44 billion for Twitter – How can Elon Musk afford it?

To finance the purchase price of around 44 billion dollars (around 44 billion euros), he had to sell huge blocks of shares and organize a lot of money from major banks.

Ultimately, the 51-year-old contributes around $27 billion, a little more than half of the total, in cash out of his own pocket. Much of that was cashed by selling $15.5 billion worth of shares in electric car maker Tesla, which he co-founded, a move Musk originally preferred to avoid.

Globally active banks such as Morgan Stanley, Mizuho, ​​Barclays and Société Générale are adding around 13 billion dollars to the deal in the form of loans. According to publicly available documents from the US financial regulator, the US bank Morgan Stanley alone is contributing around 3.5 billion dollars. Twitter itself assumes the repayment guarantee for the loans.

The smallest part of the purchase price, around $5.2 billion, will be made available to Musk by mutual funds and private investors, who will receive Twitter shares in return. One billion US dollars came from the wealthy US businessman Larry Ellison, who co-founded the software giant Oracle. The State Investment Fund of the Emirate of Qatar is also involved.