Elon Musk is the new owner over at Twitter and the social media platform is set to change in a big way under his leadership. As the deal enters its final stages before formal completion, the brass at Twitter are locking it down to prevent foul play and we’re getting a look at what made the board accept the $44 billion offer.
It’s been an interesting story since Musk bought up some 9 percent of publicly available stocks earlier this month. Initially, it looked like Musk would become part of the board but that fell through. Next, the board adopted a so-called poison pill to discourage those seeking more than a 15-percent stake in the company. And now, they’ve decided to accept Elon’s “best and final” offer of $54.20 per share (and yes, Musk just had to throw in that 4/20 reference in there).
According to the announcement made by Twitter itself, certainty and financing had a large part to do with accepting the bid. While Musk was very clear about how much he was willing to pay, about a 20-percent premium on the stock price before he acquired a stake, there were concerns that he didn’t actually have the cash to complete the sale.
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🚀💫♥️ Yesss!!! ♥️💫🚀 pic.twitter.com/0T9HzUHuh6
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022
Once he made it clear through public filings that he did indeed have that money, things came together quickly. According to Bloomberg, the sale is such a sure thing at this point that the higher-ups at Twitter have locked the system down in a large way to “keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from ‘going rogue’.”
While Musk was understandably excited and posted the above tweet, Ford Spokesperson Mike Levine took a jab by posting a 2016 story that focused on how Elon canceled the order of a “super-rude” customer after the customer published a blog post that was critical of Tesla. “Let’s hear it for free speech on Twitter” he remarked. Henrik Fisker, who has a long standing feud with Elon Musk, apparently shut down his account upon hearing the takeover news.
https://twitter.com/john__rosevear/status/1518687967992287233
It will be interesting to see how this acquisition affects the other brands that Musk is so heavily involved with. He is notorious for spending countless hours at both Tesla and SpaceX so much so that he’s been documented sleeping on the job site just to cut down on time away from the businesses themselves.
For what it’s worth, some have compared this acquisition to that of other billionaires who have bought newspapers. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, Laurene Powell Jobs has the Atlantic, and of course, Warren Buffett owns a number of regional daily papers. Hey, maybe now that Musk owns an entire social media platform he can employ some PR people for Tesla.
https://twitter.com/mrlevine/status/1518674036334620672