By selling an overvalued company, he was forced to buy (to not get away with market manipulation again), to himself by buying it at an overvalued price.
It's probably to claim tax deductions on the loss in value of both Twitter and Tesla (well mostly to avoid the loans he leveraged with it).
And money laundering is running fake money or marked bills through a legitimate business so that the bad money is spread out as change through your customers, and their clean bills come back to you.
Anyway, his little sale of twitter to grok means nothing to anyone except that the people who had a private stake in twitter now own a piece of xAI at the ratio of the sale.
He had to appease his lenders by giving them a piece of one of his other companies, since twitter is not profitable.
Money laundering as a concept is far wider than just fake money. You can do the same thing with invoices and shell companies. He did a pure paper deal between two companies and forced a high valuation that could be used for enticing investors or favorable loans with the extra equity. Next thing you know he's using xAi to buy another election.
Can I add that the book "billion dollar whale" is phenomenal and it's fucking scary what the rich can do with their money on a global scale. We aren't even in the same plane of existence as them when it comes to theft
He famously sold X/Twitter to himself for $45b, which means a valuation of $33b due to the $12b debt. The $80b valuation is for xAI, his AI startup, not for X/Twitter.
He initially bought Twitter for $44b since it was a publicly traded company and he didn’t have a choice. It’s hard to value private companies, so having it roughly at the same price as it was a few years ago is fairly standard. The exact value will be based on whatever costs him the least to restructure it (largely looking at taxes).
The $9b ($9.4b to be exact, which isn’t less than $9b) figure comes from Fidelity listing its holdings in X/Twitter and valuing them, which when extrapolated was worth $9.4b. That likely takes into account sales agreements. It’s not uncommon for private companies to have strict sales agreements on their shares, and common things in these agreements include who they can sell for and for how much. These agreements can cause your personal holdings to be worth less than the equivalent portion of the company. It can also do the opposite but I’d be very surprised if Elon set it up that way. The true market valuation would likely be a lot closer to that $9.4b figure than the $33b figure though.
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u/W4OPR 4d ago
What I would like to see is, Trump family's stock portfolio from the past 2 weeks, just to see how much did he gain on insider trading.