Elon Musk is no stranger to financial alchemy. His latest feat: adding billions of dollars of debt onto his cash-burning business empire while simultaneously cutting its annual interest burden. SpaceX sold $25 billion of investment-grade bonds on Tuesday, marking the final step to replace the costly debt that had helped finance Musk’s 2022 acquisition of X, then known as Twitter, as well as the expensive loans and bonds issued by artificial intelligence lab xAI last year to bridge its rapid cash drain.
Those entities would have spent roughly $1.8 billion to service a combined $17.5 billion of debt this year if they hadn’t been folded into SpaceX. The business is now set to pay $1.5 billion of interest annually on its $25 billion inaugural bond sale.
