Billionaire Elon Musk has revised his financing plan for the proposed $44bn deal to acquire Twitter, by increasing his personal financial commitment to $33.5bn.

The new figure was shown in a new set of SEC documents released on 24 May. These documents also state that Musk is in talks with current Twitter stakeholders, including its founder Jack Dorsey, about the possibility of contributing shares to help Musk’s deal.

The new commitment by the Tesla CEO has raised investor hopes that the deal will go ahead, causing Twitter shares to go up by 5pc, CNBC reports. The announcement follows turmoil earlier this month when Musk said the Twitter deal was “temporarily on hold”.

Musk said this was due to a recent claim by Twitter that spam and fake accounts represent less than 5pc of users on the site. A more recent estimate has suggested the number of bots could be nearly a fifth of all daily active users.

Shakeup of Twitter’s board

Musk’s new commitment was shared the day before Twitter’s annual shareholder meeting yesterday (25 May). During this meeting, the shareholders voted to boot Egon Durban from the company’s board of directors, CNBC reports.

Durban, the co-CEO of investment firm Silver Lake, is said to be a long-time business associate of Musk as his firm has worked on deals with the Tesla CEO in the past. According to CNBC, Silver Lake put $100m into Musk’s solar business called SolarCity before it was acquired by Tesla.

The shareholder meeting also saw Dorsey step down from the board of directors with immediate effect yesterday, ending his 15 year journey with the company.

Dorsey first announced his plans to leave Twitter on 29 November last year, when he stepped down as the company’s CEO. In that announcement, Dorsey said he would remain a member of the board until his term expired this year.

Meta’s also had a shakeup yesterday as Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal co-founder and tech investor, stepped down the company’s board at its annual shareholder meeting.

Thiel first announced his plans to leave Meta in February, when it was reported that he plans to focus his attention and resources on backing political allies of Donald Trump in the US midterm elections in November.

Elon Musk at a TED interview. Image: Steve Jurvetson via Flickr (CC by 2.0)

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