Twitter has approved the takeover of the social media company by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The richest man in the world has to pay a total of about 44 billion dollars to take the company off the stock exchange. This amounts to approximately 41 billion euros. This concludes a mega deal.
Current shareholders will receive $54.20 per share for their shares. That is as much as the proposal that Musk announced earlier this month. Then the consent of Twitter itself was only missing. The company’s management wanted to carefully study the unsolicited offer. To save time, a kind of protective construction was even set up.
Musk previously indicated that he himself doubted whether his takeover attempt would succeed. It later became clear that the businessman, who already owned more than 9 percent of Twitter before his takeover bid, had already started polling other investors to participate in his plans. In the end, Musk managed to get the unanimous approval of the Twitter board.
Regulators will probably still look at the deal in the near future. The acquisition is expected to be completed before the end of the year.
Final stage
Earlier today, insiders reported that talks with Musk were in the final stages of negotiations. Trading in Twitter shares was temporarily suspended on the New York Stock Exchange this evening. That indicated that news was on the way around the social media company.
Tesla CEO Musk bought into Twitter earlier this year – the billionaire bought 9 percent of the shares and became the largest shareholder – and later made a $43 billion offer for the platform. Musk believes that the short message platform has a lot of potential, but that it is not yet being realized. He wants to grow the company and, in his own words, turn it into a platform for freedom of expression.
Over the past few days, Musk has been meeting with Twitter shareholders to rally support for his offer. Many shareholders took to Twitter after Musk unveiled his plans for the acquisition last week, emphasizing that the company should not miss this opportunity. After it became known that Musk was interested in Twitter, the stock market value of the social media company rose by almost 2 billion dollars.
Heavy criticism
The Tesla CEO previously expressed heavy criticism on Twitter. He threatened in a tweet to set up a new social media platform himself because he believed Twitter would restrict freedom of expression, after which a poll followed that would have “important consequences”, according to the billionaire. He had already bought the shares at the time.
Musk has been one of the largest and best-known users of the platform for years and has 81 million followers, making him the eighth most followed person on the platform. His influential tweets have turned the price of cryptocurrencies such as Dogecoin and bitcoin several times. Earlier, the billionaire ran into problems with his Twitter account after he tweeted that he wanted to take Tesla off the stock exchange “for 420 euros per share”. The tweet turned out to be nonsense, but his shares skyrocketed. The US regulator SEC decided to sue Musk.
Musk also wondered aloud if Twitter is dying. It worried him that stars like Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift hardly post on the platform anymore. He also suggested functions to be able to edit Twitter messages after publication.
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Dwarf compared to Facebook
Musk is the richest person in the world with a net worth of $259 billion, according to Bloomberg news agency. Should he get his hands on Twitter, he will own a social media platform that is used by several hundred million people every day. At the end of 2021, the company had 217 million daily active users. Twitter is a dwarf compared to Facebook. That social medium of Meta Platforms had about 1.9 billion daily active users in December. About 7,500 people work at Twitter.
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