Most of his assets aren't liquid. Most of his wealth comes from owning about 23.5% of Tesla or 265 Million shares[0]. At Tesla's current value of 641B, that put

Most of his assets aren't liquid. Most of his wealth comes from owning about 23.5% of Tesla or 265 Million shares[0]. At Tesla's current value of 641B, that puts his Tesla wealth at about 150B. For this Twitter purchase, a lot of it was purchased using some Tesla stock as collateral, but he probably has a personal limit to how much stock he wants to leverage, and he continues to have a fiscal duty to Tesla investors to not over-collateralize his position on TSLA[1], so he probably tried to put as much of the company itself up as collateral for the loans he needed to take it private. Note that Tesla's 10-Q [2] supports this theory: "If Elon Musk were forced to sell shares of our common stock that he has pledged to secure certain personal loan obligations, such sales could cause our stock price to decline." Now this has happened before, particularly with Toys-R-Us when a private equity firm came in and did the same thing, using the business itself as collateral to get the loan that pays for all of the currently-public shares. This didn't particularly end well for the company[3]. 0: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459022022992/tsla-pre14a_20220804.htm#OWNERSHIP_SECURITIES https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459022... 1: if Tesla's stock price drops below the limit price the banks that have loaned to Musk have placed on their collateral, then the banks might not make back their loan amount+interest. There is a fiscal duty here because such an event with millions of TSLA entering the sell market, even over weeks, will tank the value of the stock 2: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000095017022019867/tsla-20220930.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000095017022... 3: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-us-bankruptcy-private-equity/561758/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-...