Twitter Agrees To $44 Billion Acquisition Offer By Elon Musk

The social media platform Twitter has officially agreed to an acquisition offer by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who made the offer after denying a board seat on the company that would have capped his maximum shares at 15%. Twitter’s Board of Directors approved the sale unanimously.

Musk will be purchasing Twitter for $54.20 a share, which is reportedly a 38 percent premium over this month’s share price, and is dropping $44 billion in total to take over the site which he has said he plans to take private.

Twitter had initially been indicating that it would resist the takeover via reports that the board was considering a “poison pill” strategy in the days right after the announcement of Musk’s offer. It’s not clear how or why this changed, but Musk did say after this plan was mentioned that he would “would need to reconsider [my] position as shareholder,” if they didn’t take his offer.

Bret Taylor, Independent Board Chair of Twitter, said in a statement “The Twitter Board conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon’s proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty, and financing.” Taylor highlighted that the move was in Twitter shareholders’ best interests when he added, “The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter’s stockholders.”

Musk has been extremely active on and very critical of the app and its current leadership both in general and especially in the weeks leading up to this acquisition. Once this deal is wrapped by the end of 2022, Musk will have no one in his way to block any changes he wishes to make to the site. In the deal announcement, Musk said, “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans.”

The billionaire’s biggest issue with Twitter seems to be in its content moderation system, with him taking a hard stance against it as most platforms have worked to update their moderation systems and ban more accounts in response to the huge amount of misinformation being proliferated online.

According to Twitter’s press release, Musk will be purchasing the company with the help of a $25.5 billion loan, and also $21.0 billion of his personal equity. It was also disclosed that Musk received financial advisement from the bank Morgan Stanley, while financial institutions Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Allen & Co. provided advice to Twitter.