The Tesla boss wants to take over Twitter,
(Photo: AP)
san francisco Tech billionaire Elon Musk launches attempt to buy Twitter. The head of the electric car manufacturer Tesla announced on Thursday an offer to buy all shares in the short message service. The billionaire announced just last week that he holds 9.2 percent of Twitter, making it the largest single shareholder.
Musk is now offering all shareholders $54.20 per share, according to a SEC filing. The stock closed at just under $46 on Wednesday. The company would be valued at around $43 billion in the offer.
In a first reaction on Thursday, Twitter shares rose almost 14 percent premarket. Tesla shares lost 1.4 percent.
“Since making my investment, it is now clear to me that the company will not thrive in its current form nor serve this societal cause,” Musk wrote in a letter to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor. The billionaire wants to take the internet platform off the stock exchange. “Twitter needs to be transformed into a private company,” he said.
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“My offer is the best and final offer,” Musk said on Thursday. “If it is not accepted, I would have to reconsider my position as a shareholder.” However, the chances of success of the takeover attack are unclear. Twitter has several financial investors as major shareholders, each holding between two and eight percent of the shares. So it would not be enough to convince only a few major shareholders to sell.
Elon Musk has 81 million followers on Twitter
Observers have already suspected that Musk could launch a takeover attack after he turned down a seat on the company’s board of directors over the weekend. According to an agreement with Twitter, he would have committed himself not to increase his stake above 14.9 percent. On the other hand, stepping down from the board opened the door for Musk to buy more shares.
It was not until November that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey withdrew from the top management and handed over the baton to Parag Agrawal. Musk is an avid Twitterer himself with more than 81 million followers. He recently called on them to vote on a so-called editing option, which Twitter has so far rejected. In less than three hours, more than 1.2 million users took part in the survey. Around three quarters were in favor of Twitter allowing tweets to be corrected afterwards.
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Since then, the Tesla boss has followed up with a new survey on Twitter. He asked users if Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters should be turned into a homeless shelter, a plan Amazon founder Jeff Bezos supports. Most recently, the billionaire proposed changes to the premium subscription service Twitter Blue, including lowering the price, banning advertising and allowing payments with the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
Twitter was recently worth a good 36 billion dollars overall. Musk is by far the richest person in the world, thanks largely to his holdings in electric car maker Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX. Financial service Bloomberg estimates his fortune at around $260 billion at recent share prices.
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