Morgan Stanley only covers part of the total deal and Musk still needs to find a solid 21 billion from somewhere. That's probably doable for him but definitely not easy. I don't see it as "more or less certain" at least..
Is Musk’s reputation so bad that he, the owner of a car company that turned the car industry on its head (by proving that electric cars were possible) and pushed a massive paradigm shift in the lithium ion battery industry/market (maybe helped with the meteoric rise in demand mobile devices in the last decade as well, admittedly) not be able to find and convince a consortium of investors to put money towards the buy out?
Maybe I’m too stuck on thinking of this as like the purchase of a sports team…
The man has several SEC processes against him in progress and most of his wealth is locked in Tesla, so financially I’d say he’s not in a great position unless he offloads Tesla stock.
what would those investors get as collateral for this loan?
Musk has apparently already pledged some percentage of his Tesla holdings as collateral (i dont know how much, but i heard it's close to 50%).
If those investors take the other 50%, then i would imagine the holdings are over-pledged with no margin for safety. May be those investors would accept the terms, but i dunno.
The leading problem is that twitter is not profitable, so any loan for buying twitter requires an alternative source of income to service the interest.
Imagine staking 50% of Tesla against owning Twitter, which feels like it's on a slow but steady death spiral.
The pitch would seem to be "sure, you could buy into twitter a lot cheaper two weeks ago, but now I'm involved! How great is that?" You're right that it depends a lot on his reputation.