Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised billionaire Ron Baron that he would make “two to three times” his money when he invested $100 million in Musk’s private deal for Twitter, Baron said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Baron has long been bullish on Tesla, telling CNBC’s Becky Quick that Musk has made Baron “$5 billion so far, on a $400 million investment.” In 2021, the investor told CNBC that he held almost 6 million Tesla shares through his investment firm Baron Capital.
Baron’s $100 million investment in Twitter is based on his longtime faith in Musk as a CEO and in his marketing expertise, he said.
“I don’t want to talk more about Twitter because I’m not an expert on it yet, but he explained when we made our investment that he saw there was a lot of spending there, that it was incredibly poorly managed,” Baron said Tuesday.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was tense and, by Musk’s own admission, “extremely difficult.” Since he completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in October, the company has made massive layoffs, scrapped its “permanent” work-from-home policy and been repeatedly sued for non-payment of bills, including bills for a private jet and rent at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
On Sunday, Musk said Twitter was “now headed for failure.”
Barron was unfazed by Twitter’s apparent bankruptcy.
“He’s the most famous person in the world, I guess,” Baron said. “Everybody else is spending $1,000 to advertise a car, he’s not spending anything because everybody knows Twitter.”
“He doesn’t spend anything because everybody knows who he is,” Baron said.
Clarification: This story has been revised to clarify that Ron Barron said Elon Musk promised Barron he would make much more from his Twitter investment. A previous version was unclear.
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