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Musk’s Twitter Deal Backed by Wall Street & Tech Investors 

BySheldon Wong

May 20, 2022
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Twitter, being one of the most popular social networking platforms is now brought by the owner of the Tesla group, Elon Musk. Earlier Musk had strengthened his equity stake in the company by acquiring around 9% of the share, making him the twitter’s largest individual shareholder. This news had shaken the internet, but Musk hasn’t stopped here. Later on, he proposed to purchase the whole organization with a massive bid of 44 billion dollars.     

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking platform based in America, which allows users to post and interact with the messages known as tweets. Moreover, users registered on this platform are allowed to share and like the posts, but unregistered users often can only have access to read those publicly available posts. 

Recently the news has been circulating that Elon Musk had offered the bid with the commitment of more than $7 billion from numerous groups of investors from Silicon Valley heavy hitters including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Moreover, he is the world’s richest person possessing a massive net worth of over $200 billion. 

A regulatory filing has indicated that Musk is also in talks with others for the additional funding. This includes the former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey, who is the second-largest stakeholder in the organization after Musk. Larry Ellison, who is also one of the board members of Tesla is contributing a whopping amount of $1 billion. 

Where the list includes other investors including tech investor Sequoia Capital Fund, which commits $800 million, and VY Capital, which pledged $700 million, as claimed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The high profile investors quoted that, it’s not Musk single-handedly trying to turn around the deal. 

Few other investors supporting Musk are the technology venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who told that his firm is putting $400 million, believing the Musk’s “brilliance to finally make it what it was meant to be”. 

While Twitter greatly promises as a public square, it dealt with countless complex issues, varying from bots to censorship to abuse, Horowitz tweeted. Twitter being a public company single-handedly relying on an advertising business model will heighten the mess. Sequoia has invested in many tech giants like Apple, Zoom, DoorDash, Netflix and others have mentioned a headline on their website quoting “we help the daring build legendary companies. 

The firm has a very existing history with Musk. It was an investor in what would become PayPal, which was co-founded by Elon Musk, and later on, sold for $1.5 billion in the year 2002. 

The cryptocurrency exchange Binance has committed $500 million looking forward that Musk would incorporate cryptocurrencies and related technology in upcoming time into his vision for Twitter. 

The co-founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao stated on Thursday, “we’re excited to be able to help Elon Musk realize a new vision for Twitter”. “We hope to be able to play role in bringing social media and web3 together and broadening the use and adoption of crypto and blockchain technology”.    

Sheldon Wong

Sheldon was a contributor on DMR. He has since left the team to pursue his career in the Insurance industry.