Elon Musk.
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- Elon Musk said Monday that he can walk away from his proposed takeover of Twitter.
- Sources told Reuters Musk was in talks with equity groups to secure up to $3 billion in backing.
- Those groups have put talks on hold, however, due to the chaos around the deal, Reuters reports.
The chaos surrounding Elon Musk’s proposed takeover of Twitter has stalled discussions between himself and backers to secure extra funding, Reuters reports.
Sources told Reuters that Musk has been in conversation with a group of private equity firms to obtain an extra $2 billion to $3 billion in funding for the deal. This would reduce the total amount of money he’d had to personally contribute.
One source said those conversations have been put on hold due to confusion around the proposed acquisition.
Musk on Monday filed a letter with the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he said he had the right to walk away from his proposed acquisition of Twitter. He added that the company was “actively resisting and thwarting his information rights.”
Musk has maintained that the platform hasn’t been transparent about how it calculates the number of bot accounts on its platform.
Analysts speculated Musk’s concerns about bot accounts are a pretext for the billionaire to force Twitter back to the negotiation table and haggle for a better price.
Following Musk’s letter on Monday, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives tweeted that he thought Musk was trying to find a reason to walk away from the deal completely.
The chaos surrounding the deal has also stalled banks’ plans to offload $13 billion in debt as they are worried credit investors might not buy it up so long as the deal remains in flux, sources told Reuters.
The sources told Reuters the banks still plan to syndicate the debt but are waiting for the situation surrounding the deal to become clearer.
Musk arranged a round of $7 billion in extra funding in May and has rearranged the financing behind the deal to limit his personal exposure.