Tesla CEO Elon Musk is infamous for using Twitter to tease and tease out various ideas he has about his business interests, cryptocurrency, politics and life in general, but today it looks like he’s making good one of the biggest of his musings. Twitter has announced that it has accepted Musk’s offer to acquire the publicly-traded company at $54.20/share, valuing the social media platform at $43 billion.
The news comes after strategically placed reports from overnight that Twitter — contrary to earlier statements about the poison pill it would prefer over Musk acquiring it — was entertaining the offer.
To be clear, this is not yet a done deal — various regulatory and shareholder approvals are still pending and there is the potential of others coming in with a different or higher offer. But it is a significant development and it’s a sign that the board is on board with the idea (heh) and is thus setting up Twitter for some kind of significant event, acquisition by Musk or otherwise.
The Twitter/Musk acquisition dance has been a pretty short one, especially considering the size of the deal: it started less than a month ago, when Musk first took to Twitter to make lots of pointed comments about social networks and Twitter itself and what it’s not doing well, only for Twitter to disclose on April 4 that Musk had in fact taken a significant, $3 billion stake, some 9.2% of shares, in the company.
A seat on the board swiftly followed before beingpulled away. Shareholders were annoyed with Musk and sued him over what they believed was obvious share price manipulation.
And Musk? Musk doubled down and said that actually he’d just prefer to buy the whole damn platform. That was on April 14.
The board baulked and the poison pill made a viral interlude in the world of corporate tech news.
But Musk, currently the world’s richest individual on paper, simply pressed on, spelled out how he would finance such a deal, and suddenly everyone started to take him seriously. Money always talks.
Overnight — last night — the leaks began to drip out about Twitter considering the deal after all.
The news is bound to upset a lot of people — Musk has a tendency to polarize, and so does Twitter, so it’s basically a given.
And so it will be intriguing to see what that spells out about Twitter as a business. It will also be worth watching to figure out just what Musk’s agenda or intention may be. Moguls buying up media properties is not exactly novel — I’d argue it’s the next (big) step up in the same trajectory that includes yachts and other iconic assets