How much money does Twitter make in a year and what percent does Elon Musk own?

Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has bought Twitter for $44 billion and taken it private after months of wrangling with its previous owners. The billionaire’s wealth is tied to his stakes in Tesla and Space X and has had no experience running a social media firm.

Twitter’s performance through the years

According to Macrotrends, Twitter’s revenue for 2022 was a little over $5 billion, which represented an increase of almost 37%.

Here are the revenue figures for Twitter for the past years.

*Source: Macrotrends

Musk’s fund-raising efforts

To finance the purchase of the company, Musk had to put up a total of $46.5 billion in equity and debt financing to cover the price of Twitter and the closing expenses. To cover the amount, several banks, among them Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, promised to provide debt financing to the tune of $13 billion. This debt would be recorded in Twitter’s accounts.

This left his $33.5 billion equity pledge (72% of the amount needed), which is a lot more cash than is involved in usual buyouts. According to Reuters, this includes his existing 9.6% holdings in Twitter, which is good for $4 billion, and $7.1 billion which he obtained from equity investors.

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Musk came up with $20 billion in cash, part of the amount coming from sales of his Tesla shares. It is not immediately clear how he covered the balance of approximately $2 billion to $3 billion.

The businessman has said that taking over Twitter was “not a way to make money.” He said he merely wanted to enable people to speak more freely on the social media platform.