Banks led by Morgan Stanley finally moved a significant amount of debt from Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase off their books.
On Feb. 13, they secured the secondary sale of $4.74 billion worth of secured loans that mature in October 2029. This is well above their original goal of $3 billion.
According to Reuters, investors will earn a 9.5% annual return on the loan amount they purchase. The debt was also priced at 100 cents on the dollar, signaling optimism over the platform’s future and a willingness to pay full price.
Initially, investors weren’t interested. After all, the social media platform—now known as X—struggled with declining ad revenue when Musk took over in 2022. The politically charged overhaul turned users off; #RIPTwitter trended, and companies stopped advertising.
Today, it’s a different scenario. Musk is fully settled into his role as a key player in the Trump administration and doing press conferences from the Oval Office. X is also amplifying right-leaning content, as shown by separate studies by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
Adweek reports that various companies—IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment, to name a few—have started spending ad dollars again on X.
Musk is now in talks to raise funds for X at a $44 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. That’s the same price the billionaire paid in 2022 when he sauntered into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a kitchen sink. Whether investors agree with that valuation remains to be seen. Last year, Fidelity Investments marked down the value of its shares in X by 71.5%.
The Trump-Musk era could yield a different result, as it has with the valuations of other companies. Tesla, for example, has seen its shares surge more than 40% since Trump’s victory in November. SpaceX was valued at $210 billion in mid-2024. By December, the valuation increased to $350 billion. Additionally, Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is raising $10 billion at a $75 billion valuation (previously $51 billion). The company just launched Grok 3, the latest iteration of a generative artificial intelligence chatbot that feeds off X’s data.
