Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk this week created three new holding companies, each with a variation of the name “X Holdings,” to help with his planned acquisition of social media giant Twitter — reports Bloomberg.
According to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk and his co-investors in the Twitter bid will pour their financing into one of these holding companies to fund a tender offer they plan to issue directly to Twitter shareholders, while a subsidiary of the entity would merge with the social media company once the deal goes through.
According to a Thursday report, Musk and his investment partners have raised $46.5 billion USD in financing for the Twitter deal. All three of the new holding companies were incorporated in Delaware.
Beyond acting as a vehicle for Musk and his co-investors to acquire Twitter, the holding companies could also carve a path for Musk to consolidate all of his other businesses under one parent company.
The celebrity billionaire has hinted at wanting one parent company for Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink as far back as 2012. Back in 2020, Musk said calling a potential holding company “X” was a “good idea.” Musk also owns the domain “X.com,” which was the name of the online payments company he founded and eventually merged with PayPal.
Bringing Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Co., and Neuralink under the same parent entity is easier said than done, however, since Tesla is a public company while the rest are all private and have soared in valuation in recent years. Such an undertaking would require corporate restructuring on a massive scale — similar to what Google had to do in 2015 to create a new holding company, Alphabet Inc.
During a sitdown with Chris Anderson, head of TED, last week, Musk didn’t dismiss the idea of a parent company for all of his ventures but did say that creating one would be “tricky.” Tesla is a publicly-traded company and the “investor base of Tesla and SpaceX, and certainly Boring Co. and Neuralink, are quite different.”
“It’s not that easy to sort of combine these things,” he told Anderson.
