The remaining 25% of the stock is divided among two groups: tech billionaires like Larry Ellison and Jack Dorsey, who rolled over their shares, and Gulf money - mainly from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Saudis are the biggest shareholders behind Musk.
Combined, these two groups paid (in cash or rollover) about $10bn-$12bn.

The "missing" $12bn+ is what this week's developments are about. It's the loans - held by big US banks - that Twitter took out on itself to buy itself. This is what a leveraged buyout means. If you know UK football, this is what the Glazers did to Manchester United.

So, why is he taking this route?

You'll see that if you try to read Twitter, you get 3 login options:
Apple
Google
Twitter
That's not a random choice. It's the 3 ways for users to pay for $8kun. And there's the fact that Google and Apple are way out ahead in the LLM stakes. He's offering privileged access.

People are making a great deal about how Twitter can't pay its Cloud bills. It sounds awfully like the stuff we heard about not paying rent.
Two of the big rent stories were a Boulder office and Twitter HQ. Rod Hilton (@/[email protected]) did an excellent thread about the Colorado situation. It was a location never used by Twitter, and being evicted was cheaper than buying itself out of a long lease.
The San Francisco rent issue evaporated when the entire building was mysteriously refinanced.
Musk doesn't care about his credit score. He's the richest person in the world. As long as he can "legally" get out of contracts, he is happy to entertain any method.

So when it comes time for Twitter to pay some other big bills, Musk is going to look at his options. They are probably variants/combinations of:
1. That partnership of sorts with Apple/Google that gives only them access to the "training data" of users.
2. Twitter files for bankruptcy.

This leaves the banks in a pickle, because - either way - they're not getting back the total and are probably not even getting the amounts they should on regular debt-servicing.
But, being banks, they're also likely to refinance the loans. This is how banks get into shit, and they never learn because governments bail them out.

That, to me, is the immediate objective. Count the number of times Donald Trump has filed for bankruptcy if you think this form of insolvency in one of his companies will hinder Musk going for the gold medal of corporate sleaze.

What Musk is doing with Twitter is selling influence to people who wish to manipulate what's become a very captive audience. His Gulf pals, Modi, DeSantis - and many more we don't know about.
Twitter itself isn't seeing any of this money. It's going to Musk in the form of contracts for his other businesses and sweetheart political deals.

Twitter will bounce back from bankruptcy and limp along until Musk has squeezed out every cent he can. Then he'll just walk away.
He's already made his $20bn and more back.
But he hasn't finished conning everyone.