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Comment by 7speter | Hacker News Reader

> Morgan Stanley only covers part of the total deal and Musk still needs to find a solid 21 billion from somewhere

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…

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> Is Musk’s reputation so bad

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.

> convince a consortium of investors to put money towards the buy out?

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.

> but i heard it's close to 50%

Imagine staking 50% of Tesla against owning Twitter, which feels like it's on a slow but steady death spiral.

He'd be staking it on revitalization of Twitter, surely you're not going to glance over that plan?

> not be able to find and convince a consortium of investors to put money towards the buy out?

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.

He is not 'the owner of a car company'. He is the majority shareholder at about 17%. Means 83% is not owned by him.

17% is not a majority. I think you just mean he is the largest shareholder.

That's right. I wanted to write 'major' shareholder and got that mangled up into 'majority' wrongly.

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