Billionaire Ron Barron was promised that he would earn two to three times more than he did if he invested $100 million in Tesla Barron said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” about CEO Elon Musk’s private deal for Twitter.
Baron has long been bullish on Tesla, telling CNBC’s Becky Quick that Musk has earned Baron “$5 billion so far on a $400 million investment.” In 2021, the billionaire investor told CNBC that he owned nearly 6 million Tesla shares through his investment firm Baron Capital. Baron’s $100 million investment in Twitter was driven by his long-standing faith in Musk as an executive and in his marketing expertise.
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“I don’t want to talk more about Twitter because I’m not an expert in that area yet, but he explained when we invested that he saw there was a lot of spending and it was incredibly poorly managed,” Baron said Tuesday.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was not easy and, by Musk’s own admission, “extremely tough.” Shortly after Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late 2022, the company made massive layoffs, scrapped its “permanent” work-from-home policy and was sued several times for not paying bills, including private jet and rent bills at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco.
On Sunday, Musk said that Twitter is “now committed to breaking even.” Barron was unfazed by Twitter’s apparent acrimony over the bankruptcy.
“I guess he’s the most famous man in the world,” Barron said. “Everyone else spends $1,000 selling a car, he spends nothing because everyone knows Twitter.”
“He doesn’t waste anything because everybody knows who he is,” Baron continued.
