Matt Levine, Columnist

Elon Checks His Pockets

Also Goldman meals and pay, fake Buffett investments, EPS rounding and algorithmic stablecoins.

One problem with Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter Inc. for about $40 billion is that he does not have $40 billion. Of course he is very rich — the richest person in the world, worth $260 billion by Bloomberg’s estimate — but most of that money is tied up in the stock of Tesla Inc., SpaceX, the Boring Co., etc., and it is not obvious that he would want to sell enough of those things to buy a new thing. Nor is it obvious that anyone else would want to give him $40 billion to buy Twitter, given that he sees Twitter as “not a way to make money” and does not “care about the economics at all.”

Another problem with Musk’s offer to buy Twitter is that, if you ask him where the money is coming from, he says things likeI have sufficient assets” and “I am not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it,” which do not inspire confidence that he has actually thought about raising the money.