According to Tesla’s proxy statement, 236 million of the 715 million shares Elon Musk beneficially owns are committed as collateral for personal loans. In that sense, roughly a third of his stake is spoken for, and the proportion has hardly moved since early 2024: the filings show 238.4 million shares at the end of March that year and 236 million at the end of August 2025.
Founder borrowing on this scale is normally private, but for Musk, it’s now visible because the Securities and Exchange Commission requires public companies to disclose the shares their officers commit as security.
Companies report the number of shares spoken for, not the size of the loan, the lender, the interest rate, or the conditions under which the lender can act. But a reader of the proxy learns how much stock is encumbered and nothing about the price of the arrangement.
Musk is somewhat of an exception by disclosure, but not by behavior. Financing against listed equity shares is a standard product for concentrated holders.
The disclosed third
Musk’s fortune passed a trillion dollars on 12 June, when SpaceX listed on Nasdaq. The company sold $75 billion of shares at $135 apiece, opened at $150 and closed the first session at $159, an 18% gain that put the valuation near $1.96 trillion. Set against a fortune of that size, a third of a Tesla stake committed to lenders looks well covered.
The complication is that the loan and the fortune behind it rest on the same asset. When Tesla falls, the lender can ask for more collateral, and the only collateral on hand is Tesla stock that has just lost value.
An investor with a spread of holdings can meet that call by selling something unrelated, or by borrowing against a different position entirely. An investor whose wealth is one company has no such option. The collateral shrinks exactly when the lender wants more of it.
The undrawn loan
The clearest evidence of the limit of this approach is a margin loan that was never drawn. Musk’s April 2022 financing for the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter included a $12.5 billion margin loan secured on Tesla stock. It was reduced the following month, then dropped altogether and replaced with equity from outside investors. Tesla had fallen almost 25% in a month, and Musk, as Forbes reported at the time, was in the position of needing more Tesla shares to cover the loan.
Securing loans against equity shares is common practice, but what varies between lenders is the fine print: how far the stock can fall before a call goes out, how long the borrower has to answer it, and what the borrower gets back at the end of the term. Those terms decide whether a falling market costs an investor some paperwork or the shares themselves.
Onto the balance sheet
Eleven days after listing, SpaceX priced $25 billion of senior unsecured notes across five tranches, from $7 billion of 5.350% notes due 2031 to $3.5 billion of 6.650% notes due 2056. The filing states the proceeds will repay the borrowings under its bridge loan facility in full.
Demand ran to $90 billion of orders, and the bridge being repaid was the $20 billion facility taken in March, when SpaceX absorbed xAI and X. The book was covered more than three times over.
That leaves the company carrying about $29 billion of long-term debt before its AI data-center business has produced revenue. Bondholders have no collateral to call and no share price to watch. They hold a claim on a business that has to earn its way to each coupon, and they find out whether it can on a payment date rather than in a margin call.
A revenue test
SpaceX reported second-quarter sales of $7.8 billion, up 92% from $4 billion a year earlier, with roughly $2 billion of the increase coming from its AI division and $1.7 billion from Starlink. It has $6.7 billion of cloud-services revenue under contract from October, and the chief financial officer, Bret Johnsen, has said the company will reach a $100 billion annualized run-rate by the end of the year. Total revenue for all of 2025 was $18.67 billion.
Reaching $100 billion from a quarter that annualizes near $31 billion asks the run-rate to more than triple in six months. Contracted cloud revenue supplies part of that. The remainder depends on demand for AI computing holding at a level the sector has not yet had to sustain through a downturn, and on customers whose own budgets are financed in the same credit markets now lending to SpaceX.
Musk kept his shares, borrowed against them, and stopped when the market decided what they were worth. In May 2022 that cost him a loan. The same bet now sits with bondholders, who hold a claim on revenue rather than on stock, and who have until 2031 to find out whether the data centers were worth the debt.
