On Tuesday, Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk is closer to closing his $44 billion takeover bid after the board approved his official buyout offer. It will now be up to shareholders to consummate the deal.
The news came after an SEC filing showing the board’s decision. Shares rebounded by 1 percent because of it. Twitter shares are around $38 a share at the publishing of this article. Musk’s offer puts the shares value at $54.20 a share.
Twitter users quickly reacted in anticipation of Musk taking over the company, which had been on pins and needles since it was announced.
Musk recently held a virtual meeting with Twitter employees and showed that he is still serious about completing his buyout of the company.
Last month, Musk said that he had put the deal “on hold” to look into whether Twitter was telling the truth about the amount of bots and fake accounts on the platform. Twitter since coalesced and offered the billionaire access to their raw data.
Before, Musk had claimed that 20 percent of the social media’s user base were spam bots. The company said that only 5 percent of its daily users were spam bots.
Musk said on Tuesday that he wants to have half the world on Twitter and hopes it becomes an “appealing” and “inclusive” platform. He said that he has a goal of “half the world” getting on Twitter and 80 percent of North America logging on during an interview with Bloomberg News’ Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Qatar World Forum.
During the forum, Musk also said that the deal by the shareholders is one of the “unresolved matters” in the deal.
On Tuesday, Twitter’s board of directors announced it “unanimously recommends that you vote (for) the adoption of the merger agreement” in an address to shareholders, according to their SEC filing.
Last month, Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO and will take home nearly a billion if the deal goes through. According to SEC documents, Dorsey owns 2.4 percent or 18,042,428 shares in Twitter. The current chief executive, Parag Agrawal, will pocket $42 million.
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Musk has said that he plans to take over the role of interim CEO when he takes the company over.
There is no scheduled date for the deal to go through, but the filed merger agreement includes a October 24 as the date it will be finished.
Musk’s stated goal for the company is to raise the user numbers from 229 million to 1 billion. He has also flip flopped on whether the service would continue to serve ads.
“I’m not against advertising. I would probably talk to the advertisers and say, like, ‘hey, let’s just make sure the ads are as entertaining as possible,” Musk said when addressing Twitter employees last week.
Are you glad that Musk’s twitter buy has gone through? It’s been quite the journey from its original announcement. There has been some beef between former President Donald Trump and the Tesla CEO because the former has introduced his own free speech platform: Truth Social. Are you back on Twitter? Let us know your thoughts.
