Elon Musk’s Close Friend Jason Calacanis Raising Funds for Twitter Takeover

UTC by Godfrey Benjamin · 3 min read
Elon Musk’s Close Friend Jason Calacanis Raising Funds for Twitter Takeover
Photo: Drew McLellan / Flickr

Calacanis wants at least a $250,000 financial commitment from interested investors, from which he will take an $18,000 fee.

Despite the fact that Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has won the bid to buy social media giant Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) for $44 billion, there is still a need to bankroll the deal, and Jason Calacanis, one of Musk’s friends, wants to be a part of the takeover.

Jason Calacanis is an Angel Investor that took an early bet on top-rated companies like Uber Technologies Inc (NYSE: UBER) and Robinhood Markets Inc (NASDAQ: HOOD). From an email that was sighted by CNBC, Jason is now soliciting funds from his network of High Networth Individuals (HNI).

“We are now collecting interest to invest in Twitter with Elon Musk’s plan to take it private,” Calacanis said in the email.

From the details of the proposition, Jason wants at least a $250,000 financial commitment from interested investors, from which he will take an $18,000 fee. While he hopes to pull in significant capital to finance the takeover, Jason said as the manager of the funds, 10% of the proceeds from the investment will be levied, and it was not immediately clear whether his proposal has received any form of interest from any potential investor yet.

Jason Calacanis and Elon Musk have been quite close for a while and evidence points out that both men interact more often than it can be seen on social media. According to CNBC, Jason was present on the Saturday Night Live (SNL) show in which Musk was a special guest in New York last year.

#SNL rehearsal was amazing,” Jason said in a tweet at the time. “The entire production was amazing to witness.”

Besides his SNL presence, Jason also speaks well of Musk in his podcasts including This Week in Startups and The All-In Podcast respectively.

Jason Calacanis and Elon Musk’s New Twitter Investors

While sources have confirmed that Elon Musk does not intend to be the face or the leader behind Twitter for a long time, he has immediate plans to take the social media company private, and to do so, he will have to settle the firm’s existing investors.

Known as a free speech advocate, the ideologies behind Twitter are resonating with many investors in the financial world and a number of them have shown interest in backing Musk in his agenda for Twitter. As reported by Coinspeaker, the Binance exchange joined Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) amongst other venture capital firms to raise over $7 billion for the takeover. Binance bankrolled the deal with $500 million, a fund CEO Changpeng Zhao said is the firm’s small contribution to the cause.

While Elon Musk still remains the world’s wealthiest man with the capacity to fund the buyup single-handedly, regulatory constraints will prevent him from doing so, and so means the funding from Jason Calacanis will go a long way to helping achieve his short-term goals.

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