Bank of America Corp., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley were three of the banks that provided Musk personal loans, according to a 2020 Tesla filing. He has hired Morgan Stanley to advise on the Twitter bid, and his family office, Excession, is run by longtime adviser Jared Birchall, a former Morgan Stanley banker.
No matter how he goes about it, buying all of Twitter would be a stark shakeup of Musk’s empire. His purchase of a 9.1 percent stake, first disclosed last week, marked his first significant diversification outside of Tesla and SpaceX.
“I am not playing the back-and-forth game,” Musk said in Thursday’s filing. “I have moved straight to the end. It’s a high price and your shareholders will love it. If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.”
Musk has played up his devotion to both Tesla and SpaceX, frequently tweeting about their achievements and claiming to sleep on the floor of a Tesla factory to set an example to his employees. Meanwhile, since disclosing his stake in Twitter, he has appealed to fellow users about potential moves and in one case suggested the website might be dying, given the lack of tweets from some celebrities.
In recent years, Musk has indicated he’s streamlining at least some aspects of his financial affairs. He’s sold multiple mansions in California after vowing to “own no home,” in 2020. He currently lives in Texas, where he relocated the headquarters of Tesla last year.