this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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He’d have to give them this as equity in the company, he’s not liquid for that amount. None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have.
This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho
Musk paid $44 billion in cash for Twitter. Billionaires only have wealth on paper until they want to buy a company, then magically they have the cash.
It’s my understanding that Musk borrowed heavily from investors for that cash.
Buy, Borrow, Die strategy.
Buy something that potentially increases in value (real estate, companies, stock etc)
Borrow money against the appreciated value of step 1, this borrowing in not taxable.
Die and leave assets to whoever and never pay tax on the assets.
Yeah and a lot of that came from other investors
Other investors that will be coming to look for their investment money
It's called leveraged borrowing, it's how the billionaire class pays for things. The banks typically give them super low rates and generous terms on these types of loans.
So what Elon did was took a loan against his assets, Tesla stock, at a low APR with very loose repayment terms, then paired that with money pledged by a few other minority investors and that's how he was able to quickly come up with 44 billion to buy Twitter.
https://youtube.com/shorts/J3UVMlDUFkc
https://youtu.be/J3UVMlDUFkc
https://youtu.be/LpgNHaCuu44
You need this guy on YouTube. He's excellent at shedding light on this stuff. He has stuff for lobbying, aipac, billionaires, rfk, private equity, and more
IIRC they basically use some of their shares like a credit card, since the value of their shares keeps appreciating the interest is much easily paid off
Musk paid very little for twitter. He paid $0 in real money. He traded (iirc) like $13b of Tesla stock. The rest was filled by Saudi investors and western banks, who were greatly encouraged to own and control one of the primary modalities of communication in the 21st century. Either way very little actual cash transferred hands