By Amelia Isaacs on Monday 9 May 2022
The head of Tesla has secured more than $7bn to back his bid to acquire Twitter.
After striking a deal with Twitter to buy the social media platform for $44bn, Elon Musk has seen a surge of backers, including a number of familiar faces in the fintech world.
The investors include Sequoia Capital, a16z, Binance, Fidelity, Honeycomb and DFJ Growth VC, and will enable the Tesla and SpaceX CEO to cut his Morgan Stanley loan in half from $12.5bn to $6.25bn.
With one of the largest investments, according to the regulatory filing, Sequoia Capital has given Musk $800m, while the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance has financed $500m.
The company’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, took to Twitter to express his hope that this “small contribution to the cause” will “help web3 to tackle web2 issues on social media like bots and privacy, and grow adoption of crypto and blockchain”.
He strengthened this suggestion of web3 integration into the platform by later tweeting that he hopes to support free speech, help (big) entrepreneurs, invest in tools he uses and align the mission of “bring[ing] web2 to web3”
Silicon Valley venture capital firm a16z chipped in $400m in backing and shared its support for Elon Musk on Twitter.
“Elon is the one person we know and perhaps the only person in the world who has the courage, brilliance, and skills to fix all of these [Twitter issues] and build the public square that we all hoped for and deserve,” a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz tweeted.
DFJ Growth VC also invested $100m, while Honeycomb Asset Management contributed $5m and asset management giant Fidelity contributed more than $316m.
The funding follows the investment fund’s £35m Series D injection into digital wealth manager Moneybox just last month.
