Musk boosts equity component of Twitter bid to $33.5bn

Elon Musk is dropping plans to partially fund his purchase of Twitter with a margin loan tied to his Tesla stake and increasing the size of the deal’s equity component to $33.5bn.

Musk will provide an additional $6.25bn in equity financing for the buyout, according to a regulatory filing on Wednesday. That’s enough to eliminate the margin loan of the same size, which had already been reduced earlier this month.

The Tesla chief executive is continuing to seek additional financing commitments to fund the $44bn deal, including having discussions with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and other investors about rolling their equity into the private company, the filing said.

Musk’s Twitter purchase originally relied on $21bn of equity that he has to come up with and $12.5bn in margin loans secured by his Tesla stock. That margin loan was cut to $6.25bn on May 5, after he announced that he’d secured equity commitments from other investors.

Musk is the world’s richest person, with a personal fortune of $200bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s largely due to his stake in Tesla, the electric carmaker he co-founded.

Twitter was up 6.8 per cent from its closing price in after-hours trading at 4.58pm in New York, while Tesla slid 1.4 per cent.