Endeavor Group Holdings CEO Ari Emanuel’s longstanding ties with Elon Musk led to the company investing a “small amount” in Twitter, a source has confirmed to Deadline.
Axios broke the news of the investment earlier Tuesday, noting that Endeavor is the first public company to be identified as an investor in Twitter. Musk took the social media giant private last year in a $44 billion acquisition backed by a number of financial institutions. He has let go of thousands of workers and signaled at times that bankruptcy could potentially be in its future.
The amount of the investment was characterized by the source as “immaterial” to the operations of Endeavor. The only other explanation for the buy-in beyond the relationship with Musk is that Emanuel has long been fascinated with technology. Last month, his introductory remarks during a conference call with Wall Street analysts to discuss fourth-quarter results were rendered via AI technology Endeavor owns.
Musk, who also runs Tesla and SpaceX, was added to Endeavor’s board of directors in 2021 after the company had its IPO, though he later exited. Emanuel also is believed to have engineered the booking of Musk as host of Saturday Night Live in 2021. A photo of a shirtless Musk photographed on a yacht in Greece with Emanuel and several others circulated widely in mid-2022.
After offering his unsolicited bid for Twitter in the spring of 2022, Musk then spent months in a legal fight to extricate himself from the acquisition. In the end, he withdrew his claims and the deal officially closed last October. The transaction kicked off a chaotic period of layoffs and disarray in the company’s operations, with many longtime advertisers heading to the sidelines amid the tumult. Just yesterday, Musk himself — an unavoidable presence for any user — responded in a tweet about a glitch on the site by conceding that the company’s technology is “brittle” but vowing that it would be “fixed soon.”