Elon Musk Made A $13 Billion Mistake. Here's Why It Didn't Torch His Career

In the country's current environment of polarization and division, it can be nice to know we all have something in common: making mistakes. While some mistakes are larger than others, no single person is immune to messing up and this truth even extends to public personalities like Elon Musk. For example, in the process of Musk's takeover of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the billionaire made a rather egregiously mistake to the tune of $13 billion dollars. 

To be more specific, Musk took out a $13 billion dollar loan in order to contribute to his $44 billion dollar purchase of the social media platform. This loan has led to a significant debt burden for the company. This combined with Musk's single handed destruction of much of Twitter's former revenues, should be causing significant financial strain for the platform — which already had an abundance of problems in regards to generating revenue. However, while a mistake of this magnitude would typically annihilate the career of a normal person and cause the implosion of the company, Musk remains slippery. 

As the richest person on the planet, Musk has been able to successfully make all of the interest payments on X's loans — which cost him roughly $1.5 billion annually, according to Business Insider. Plus, despite this financial blunder, banks still want to work with him.

In February 2025, Morgan Stanley and six other banks were able to sell off the vast majority of the debt taken on during Musk's Twitter buyout. In fact, banks now hold less than $1.3 billion of the initial $13 billion. In late March, Musk then purchased X with his artificial intelligence company, xAI. This further eased the financial struggles the social media company was facing. In fact, part of the buyout included $12 billion in debt. 

That said, even though the value of X has declined significantly since Elon initially purchased it in 2022, it's clear that investors are still largely happy to work with Musk in large part due to the theoretical worth of his many businesses. It's also worth noting that only 2% of Musk's total net worth even comes from X in the first place, so any financial struggles the company has experienced  have barely made a dent in his overall financial status. However, considering that people are selling their Teslas en masse as a means of protesting of Musk's recent controversial actions as head of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, the world's richest man may be at risk of losing his title in the near future. Forbes even recently adjusted their estimates, finding that Tesla was no longer Musk's most valuable asset in the wake of consumer backlash and stock dips. Musk's 42% stake in SpaceX is now worth the most, at $147 billion.

According to Fidelity, in the roughly three years since Musk initially purchased X (which was then known as Twitter), the company had lost about 72% of its value. Specifically, as of January 2025, Fidelity valued X at just $12.3 billion – meaning the company was actually worth $700 million dollars less than the $13 billion worth of loans that Musk had to take out to buy it in the first place. With that said, that January valuation represented a 32.3% increase at the time compared to previous reports.

This decline in value can largely be attributed to Musk's controversial public statements and actions — including insulting advertisers, suing advertisers, and even engaging in censorship of journalists on the platform — which caused many advertisers to abandon working with the company altogether. With that said, there is a much to be said for how Musk's X takeover strategy mirrors the billionaire's current DOGE approach. Only, unlike playing with a social media platform's numbers on a spreadsheet, Musk is now playing with the federal government — and people's lives.