Elon bought Twitter for $44B, with a combination of his own money, money raised from investors, and $12B worth of debt secured by his Tesla shares. Since that

Elon bought Twitter for $44B, with a combination of his own money, money raised from investors, and $12B worth of debt secured by his Tesla shares. Since that time Twitter's valuation continued to drop, and by late 2024 several investors (like Fidelity) had marked the company's overall value down to as little as $9B. Now with the recent stock market turmoil and Tesla's massive share price drop, his Twitter loan is in danger of getting margin called, and that would spell disaster for Tesla, Twitter and his own finances. Separately Elon also started xAI, which received $6B of funding at a $40B valuation, and is in talks to raise more. So now he is doing some financial engineering to "sell" Twitter (X) to xAI. This means (1) whoever owns shares in Twitter can mark up their books again and (2) he can raise more funding for the combined entity and use that to pay off the Twitter loan.