Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter outright in a deal worth $43 billion in cash. He became the company’s largest individual shareholder recently.
According to a regulatory filing with the SEC, Musk offered to buy the platform at a premium price per share. “I made an offer,” Musk tweeted to his 81 million followers on the platform earlier today. “My offer is my best and final offer, and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” Musk tweeted. Twitter has confirmed they received the buyout offer, calling it ‘unsolicited.’
Musk currently owns more than 9% of Twitter shares. If he were to sell his stake in the company, it may trigger a sharp sell-off as other investors flee the platform. Musk’s offer of $54.20 per share is 38% more than value of Twitter stock the day before the announcement was made. Twitter shares were up less than 1% at the time of the announcement, suggesting investors aren’t jumping on the announcement.
Analyst Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities says he believes Elon Musk will succeed in his offer to buy Twitter.
“It would be hard for any other bidders/consortium to emerge, and the Twitter board will be forced likely to accept this bid, or run an active process to sell Twitter,” the analyst wrote in notes to clients. The analyst also expressed concerns that Musk is already CEO of two other companies – Tesla and SpaceX.
Elon Musk disclosed on April 4 that he was buying Twitter shares and has become its largest investor. He has been an active user of the platform for years, but many critics have questioned the billionaire’s intentions with the platform.
Musk himself has questioned Twitter’s commitment to free speech and has mused about creating his own rival social network. He’s also spent time recently polling his 81 million followers about features they’d like to see added to the platform.
Those tweets included ideas like turning its San Francisco office into a homeless shelter and deleting the ‘w’ from Twitter’s name. Many of these tweets are now deleted.
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk writes in a letter to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor. “However, since making my investment, I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.”
Sure, he’s got money, but he’s also an egomaniac, bullshit artist, hype-monger, manipulator, etc. Enough.
Musk is being sued for breaking the law by buying Twitter stocks without telling anybody.