Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Thursday, May 5th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Elon gets some friends to join his Twitter deal. And does he expect to be Twitter CEO soon?

A Google acquisition shows their metaverse aspirations, Sonos to launch a voice assistant,

a hiring slowdown for meta, how can there be need for layoffs at Cameo, and is anyone other than me

and the US government concerned about quantum computing breaking encryption?

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

So there have been new Elon Twitter stories literally every day since we last talked

about the whole Elon Twitter saga, but I've been avoiding

doing those stories because they seemed incremental to me or behind the scenes

are merely just fresh takes and Lord knows this show could be Elon and Twitter every single day

but that would get old. However, this is clearly notable primarily because it

probably has a knock-on effect on Tesla.

According to a filing, Elon Musk has secured 7.14 billion dollars for his Twitter

bid from Larry Ellison, Binance Sequoia, Saudi Prince Al-Walid,

Fidelity, and others.

Ellison alone is kicking in $1 billion.

This has the effect of reducing Elon's personal margin loan to make the Twitter deal happen from 12.5 billion dollars to 6.25 billion dollars, which means, in short, he will have to sell less of his Tesla stock just to raise cash for the deal.

Quoting the Financial Times.

The biggest new backing for his purchase comes from Ellison who is contributing $1 billion.

Venture Capital Firm Sequoia is providing $800 million,

while Dubai-based tech investment firm

Vai Capital is giving $700 million.

...