Though Elon Musk‘s reported net worth is around $200 billion, it’s not like the controversial entrepreneur is Scrooge McDucking it by sleeping on a giant pile of cash. So, when he ultimately went through with the $44 billion deal, Musk, 51, used personal assets, investment funds, and bank loans to pay the price tag. One of the investors who chipped in to cover the cost was Sean “Diddy” Combs, according to TMZ. Diddy, 53, reportedly invested “north of $10 million” in the deal, according to the publication’s sources.
Diddy’s investment reportedly “revolves around having a seat at the table to represent,” according to TMZ. Diddy’s last major Twitter news came when Kanye “Ye” West returned to Twitter after he was kicked off of Instagram after sharing antisemitic remarks made in a conversation with Diddy.
The news also came the same day that Diddy announced that he’d acquired Cresco Labs and Columbia Care’s divestiture in three markets, creating the first minority-owned, vertically integrated multi-state operator. Diddy’s investment created the largest Black-owned cannabis company in the world, a loud statement since cannabis prohibition affected BIPOC communities much harsher than White communities.
TMZ also reports that “Diddy and the rest of Elon’s Twitter investors believe in Elon’s vision for the bird app,” though the publication didn’t say what that vision was. As of Friday, Nov. 4, that vision included massive layoffs that resulted in Twitter Inc. temporarily closing its office doors and cutting workers’ access to internal systems. Twitter, aka Elon, told its employees that “they would be informed by email about whether they were being laid off,” per Reuters.
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” an internal email reportedly read. Elon is looking to cut “half the workforce, as he seeks to slash costs and impose a demanding new work ethic.”
Elong reportedly sold around $15.5 billion in Tesla shares earlier in the year to help finance the deal, per Al-Jazeera. Though Elon had hoped to avoid paying more than that, he ended up contributing $27 billion in cash for the transaction. $5.2 billion came from investment groups and significant funds, while the remaining $13 billion is from bank loans, including from Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Japanese banks Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and Mizuho, Barclays and the French banks Societe Generale and BNP Paribas. The loans are “guaranteed by Twitter, and it is the company, not Musk himself, which will assume the financial responsibility to pay them back.”
Brands like General Mills, the Volkswagen Group, Toyota, and others have paused advertising on the platform in the wake of the shakeup, per CNN. This has shaken Elon to the point where he tweeted on Friday (Nov. 4), “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation.” He also chastised “activists” for trying to destroy free speech.
It should be noted that usage of the N-slur increased by 500% in a 12-hour period after Musk purchased Twitter. Yoel Roth, at the time Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, blamed the rise on a “trolling campaign,” saying that only 300 accounts were to blame for the rise in the hate speech, per Variety.