Elon Musk says he has £35.6bn in financing ready to buy Twitter

Elon Musk says he has lined up 46.5 billion dollars (£35.6 billion) in financing to buy Twitter and is trying to negotiate an agreement with the company.

Last week, Mr Musk announced an offer to buy the social media company for 54.20 dollars per share, or about 43 billion dollars (£32.9 billion).

At the time, he did not say how he would finance the acquisition.

The Tesla chief executive said on Thursday in documents filed with US securities regulators that he is exploring what is known as a tender offer to buy all of the social media platform’s common stock for 54.20 dollars per share in cash.

Under a tender offer Mr Musk, who owns about 9% of Twitter shares, would take his offer directly to other shareholders, bypassing the board.

But he has not decided yet whether to do that.

The documents say Twitter has not responded to Mr Musk’s proposal.

Last week Twitter’s board adopted a “poison pill” defence that could make a takeover attempt prohibitively expensive.

The filing states that “entities related to (Mr Musk) have received commitment letters committing to provide an aggregate of approximately 46.5 billion dollars”.