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Elon Musk boosts equity component of Twitter bid to $33.5 billion

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., speaks during a discussion at the Satellite 2020 Conference in Washington, D.C.Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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

Musk will provide an additional $6.25 billion in equity financing for the buyout, according to a regulatory filing 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 $44 billion deal, including having discussions with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and other investors about rolling their equity into the private company, the filing said.

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Musk’s Twitter purchase originally relied on $21 billion of equity that he has to come up with and $12.5 billion in margin loans secured by his Tesla stock. That margin loan was cut to $6.25 billion 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 $200 billion, 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% from its closing price in after-hours trading at 4:58 p.m. in New York, while Tesla slid 1.4%.