WSJ News Exclusive | Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Close at Hand as Banks Begin to Turn Over $13 Billion of Cash

Once final closing conditions are met, the funds will be made available for Mr. Musk to execute the transaction by the Friday deadline.

It indicates the deal is on track to close, after Mr. Musk visited Twitter’s San Francisco office Wednesday. “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” Mr. Musk tweeted, along with a video of himself walking into Twitter’s headquarters carrying a white basin.

Twitter told employees in an internal message that they would hear directly from Mr. Musk on Friday, according to an internal note reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The billionaire also changed the bio description on his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit” and added his location as “Twitter HQ.”

Funding notices are typically sent three to five days in advance of when the money is needed. In normal circumstances, such documents are part of the mundane deal-closing procedures handled by back-office staffers that receive little to no mention. But after Mr. Musk spent months trying to back out of the deal to buy Twitter before flip-flopping and agreeing to go through with it earlier this month, Wall Street and Silicon Valley alike have been on high alert for evidence that he will actually follow through.

If Mr. Musk proceeds to close the deal as the signs currently suggest, it would bring to an end a six-month-long corporate drama and Twitter would cease to be publicly traded, with its current shareholders receiving $54.20 a share. The outspoken billionaire entrepreneur is expected to take the influential platform in a new direction, having floated ideas for changing Twitter, including by limiting content moderation and ushering in a new business model.

As recently as earlier this month, Mr. Musk was slated to face Twitter in a Delaware court over the stalled deal. He had argued the company misled him about its business including the amount of spam on its platform. Twitter countered that he was looking for an out after a market downturn gave him cold feet.

Then, in the days before he was to sit for a deposition, Mr. Musk changed his position again and proposed closing the deal at the original price. The judge presiding over the legal clash postponed a trial scheduled to start Oct. 17 and gave Mr. Musk until Oct. 28 to close the deal.

Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick said if the deal doesn’t close by that date, the parties should contact her to schedule a November trial.

The closing of the deal won’t be the end of the story for the banks that agreed to help fund it, including

Morgan Stanley,

MS 0.50%

Bank of America Corp.

and

Barclays

BCS -0.14%

PLC. They are likely to hold on to the debt rather than sell it to third-party investors, as is the norm in such deals, until the new year or later, people familiar with the matter have said. Those lenders could face upward of $500 million in losses if they tried to sell Twitter’s debt at current market levels, as many investors are worried about a recession and curbing new exposure to risky bonds and loans.

—Alexa Corse and Lauren Thomas contributed to this article.

Write to Laura Cooper at [email protected], Alexander Saeedy at [email protected] and Cara Lombardo at [email protected]