From Tesla to Twitter: Musk starts $43-bn hostile takeover of microblogging site
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: If he succeeds, it may become the world’s most expensive hostile takeover of a company. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who heads Tesla Inc., will pay USD 54.20 per share in cash, a 54 percent premium over Twitter’s closing share price on January 28 this year. The deal may be worth about USD 43 billion.
The deal is interesting for India as well because of Parag Agrawal, the 37-year-old Indian-American, who, in November 2021, was promoted from Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
In the recent past, Musk had dropped plans to join the Twitter Board and deleted tweets. They accused him of dodging limits on Twitter Board seat refusal and breaking the law to buy stock in the microblogging social media major. A Twitter investor had sued him over hiding his stake—9 percent—but he may escape regulatory action.
According to reports on Thursday, the Tesla Motors CEO has made a “best and final” offer to buy Twitter Inc., saying he will unlock the company’s extraordinary potential.
Musk, whose net worth is over USD 260 billion, might pay USD 54.20 per share in cash, representing a 54 percent premium over the January 28 closing price and a total value of about USD 43 billion.
With this announcement, the social media behemoth’s shares soared 18 percent, the media reported.
Musk, 50, announced the offer in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. On April 4, he had first disclosed a stake of about 9 percent in Twitter, on which he has over 80 million followers.
The Tesla boss had already suggested he would like to make changes on the microblogging platform which had offered him a seat on the Board after he announced his stake, the largest by any individual.
After making his stake public, Musk immediately appealed to fellow users about prospective moves, from turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter and adding an edit button for tweets to granting automatic verification marks to premium users. One tweet even suggested Twitter might be dying, given that several celebrities with high numbers of followers rarely tweet.
But the question is: if it is dying, why would a futurist Elon Musk buy Twitter?
