Elon Musk says he’s open to buying Silicon Valley Bank

Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX

Elon Musk has said he’s open to the idea of buying the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank and turning it into a digital bank. His remark came after US regulators pulled the plug on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on Friday.

Min-Liang Tan, co-founder and CEO of Razer, tweeted “I think Twitter should buy SVB and become a digital bank.”

“I'm open to the idea,” Musk tweeted in response. The billionaire entrepreneur had last year acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal. He had then floated the idea of bringing payments to the microblogging platform as the first step towards making Twitter an 'everything app.'

Musk's remarks on the SVB crisis, coupled with his earlier interest in creating a payments platform on Twitter, has raised speculation that his tweet may have been in earnest.

I’m open to the idea

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2023

Its demise represents not only the largest bank failure since Washington Mutual in 2008, but also the second largest failure ever for a retail bank in the United States.

The surprisingly rapid collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has left markets rattled. SVB's problems were sparked by customer withdrawals that led the company to liquidate securities positions whose values had plummeted due to the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes.

The quick jump in interest rates meant that securities they had bought were selling for significantly less.

(With inputs from AFP)