Featured Image: James Duncan Davidson

Elon Musk’s bold move of buying out Twitter, taking it private, making it more of a “free” bird than it is now, is apparently aligning well with at least a few notable tech folks, if not all. a16z’s Ben Horowitz is the latest to join in the bid, committing $400Mn to Musk’s bid, which has already seen participation from the likes of Sequoia, crypto-major Binance, Oracle’s Larry Elison among others.

The largest of those contributions still comes in from Elison, who committed a staggering $1Bn to Musk’s bid. Sequoia has written a $800Mn cheque, VyCapital $700 million and Binance has chipped in $500 million. Considering the massivity of Musk’s bid, these contributions, though noteworthy and large in absolute terms, are mostly ‘chip-ins’, with no significant $1Bn+ buy-in coming in from any notable PE firms.

“Elon is the one person we know and perhaps the only person in the world who has the courage, brilliance, and skills to fix all of these and build the public square that we all hoped for and deserve,” tweeted Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Interestingly, despite rumours and ‘internal sources’, no PE firm has come up to back any portion of Elon Musk’s bid, at least as per the latest amended 13D filing. Qatar too is a backer for Musk’s bid, which ironically itself has one of the worst performing records when it comes to freedom of speech, something that Musk has been proclaiming to be absent from Twitter at the moment.

Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who had in initially opposed the buyout, also agreed to roll his $1.89Bn stake into the deal rather than cashing out, the filing show. Musk’s own margin loan has been reduced from $12.5Bn to $6.25Bn. Additionally, his $21 billion financing commitment was also revised to $27.25Bn.

In totality, Elon Musk has over $7Bn in commitment from various investors, representing nearly 6.3% of the overall $44Bn bid.