Binance, Larry Ellison, Sequoia back Elon Musk's Twitter buyout

Crypto exchange Binance, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and asset managers Brookfield and Fidelity are among 18 investors which helped Elon Musk raise $7.14 billion in equity to fund his $44 billion Twitter buyout.

Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, has cut the biggest cheque worth $1 billion through his Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust, Twitter says in an SEC filing.

With the new funding commitments, the Tesla chief executive has reduced the margin loan he has taken with a group of lenders by half to $6.25 billion and increased the equity financing to $27.25 billion, the filing says.

Sequoia Capital has provided the second-largest equity commitment of $800 million. Tech investor VyCapital has chipped in with a funding commitment of $700 million while the world's largest crypto exchange Binance has offered $500 million to back Musk’s acquisition bid.

Saudi prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud has also committed to providing nearly 35 million shares in Twitter to retain a stake following the company's takeover by Musk, the filing says.

Musk is in discussions with certain existing shareholders including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to give than an option to stockholders to contribute their shares to the buyout, it adds.

This comes a day after Musk tweeted that the microblogging platform may charge "a slight fee" to governments and commercial users. The Tesla CEO, however, assured that Twitter will always be free for "casual users".

Musk also said that the company will try to keep as many shareholders as legally possible in privately-held Twitter.

The deal, which has been unanimously approved by the Twitter board of directors, is expected to close in 2022, subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders.

In its earnings release last month, Twitter said it overstated the number of daily active users for three years due to an error caused by its account linking feature. The feature, launched in March 2019, allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between accounts.

"An error was made at that time, such that actions taken via the primary account resulted in all linked accounts being counted as mDAU (monetisable daily active users)," the company said in its March quarter earnings release. This resulted in an overstatement of mDAU from the first quarter of calendar year 2019 through Q4 2021. The social media company says it overstated users by up to 1.9 million in the last quarter of 2021.

Twitter's average daily active users stood at 229 million in the first quarter of 2022, up 15.9% compared to Q1 of the prior year. This includes 39.6 million DAUs in the US.