Elon Musk Twitter

The announcement ends a weeks-long saga Musk kicked off when he offered to buy the company at $54.20 per share, his "best and final."

Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it." The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter's stockholders." The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter's closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter. He also said he generally would prefer "time-outs" to permanent bans, which could suggest a path for former President Donald Trump to rejoin the platform under Musk's control. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company. The SEC declined to comment on Musk's remarks at the time. Despite his being the world's richest person, much of his wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, meaning he would likely have to borrow against his holdings to fund the deal. Musk's interest in Twitter comes from his own frequent use of the platform. The plan would dilute that person's holdings in a strategy commonly employed to prevent unwanted acquisitions. The announcement ends a weekslong saga Musk kicked off when he disclosed a large stake in the company. Twitter would become a private company on completion of the deal, which requires shareholder and regulatory approval. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.

Before Twitter accepted Musk's $44 billion offer, he has floated numerous ideas for changing the social network. Not all of those proposals have been ...

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Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion (R689 billion), using one of the biggest leveraged buyout deals in history to take…

The deal was unanimously approved by the company’s board, and is expected to be completed later this year. The 50-year-old billionaire himself mused at a TED event the day it was announced that even he had doubts about its prospects. Twitter shares were halted for the news. Twitter caught fire among politicians, celebrities and journalists and took its place alongside social media stalwarts Facebook and YouTube as a standard bearer of a new, more interactive way of using the web that came to be known as Web 2.0. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in the statement on Monday. “Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.” He also suggested Twitter’s user growth was inflated by bots.

The world's richest man succeeded in a bid to acquire the influential social networking service, which he has said he wants to take private.

Elon Musk may be the world's richest person - but he only has R47 billion in cash and somewhat liquid assets, according to Bloomberg estimates.

Musk’s cash estimate is based on filings related to publicly traded shares and news reports, but much of the information on his private finances is limited. For one, concerns about Musk needing to sell some of his shares may already be weighing on the electric carmaker’s stock price. Bloomberg News reported Monday that Musk is lining up equity partners and continuing talks with other potential co-investors. He’s already hinted that such a strategy may be in the cards. Ultimately, there’s little doubt he can come up with the money. But he’s been short on details about how he’ll fund the remainder.

Musk, the C.E.O. of Tesla and the richest man on earth, plans to take the social-media company private, and has said that he wants Twitter to adhere more ...

And I think people are recognizing that Elon Musk has created a lot of value for his companies by being unhinged on Twitter. And I think there are imitators, and I think we’re kind of early in the game. If you are the richest person in the world, and annoying, and you constantly play a computer game, and you get a lot of enjoyment and sense of identity from that game, maybe a little addicted, then at some point you might have some suggestions for improvements in the game.” At one level, this is a more personal account of his desire to buy Twitter. And then there is the more financial, or business, account, which you have just explained. But, at the same time, it almost seems like it’s impossible to disaggregate those two things, unless you think that all of his behavior is some elaborate performance or something, which I don’t think anyone really believes. He might say, “Look, I get so much value out of this direct access to the public.” Owning that direct access to the public—owning that thing that creates so much value for Elon Musk and Tesla—it has to be valuable somehow, whether it’s by increasing the value that it creates for Tesla, or whether it’s by finding a way to monetize the value that it creates for sports stars and celebrities and Donald Trump and lots of other people. It’s not obvious how the company would, but if you’re sitting on top of a thing that can create that much value, surely, if you’re really smart then you can extract some value out of it. And those expectations are probably helped by having a charismatic, noisy founder who makes a lot of jokes online and is sort of a science-fiction character himself, and portrays himself as a science-fiction character, and who appeals to people who like that by making jokes. The value of his company is enhanced by his being a very strange public figure on Twitter, and so he clearly sees a lot of value in tweeting, and probably wants to own that for himself. And the stock-market value of Tesla, which makes Elon Musk the richest person in the world, comes from a lot of extreme optimism about Tesla’s future ability to make more cars and become the dominant player in car-making as cars become more electric. And so the value of these companies in the market is largely derived from expectations around how much money they’ll make in the future, as opposed to how much money they’ve made in the past. It’s not obvious to me how, if he bought Twitter, he would then be better able to get his message out, or better able to tell a story in a way that is good for Tesla and good for his economic interests. So how much do you connect Tesla’s worth to Elon Musk as a person and the way he orients himself toward the world, especially on Twitter? To talk about Musk and what the future holds for his newest acquisition, I spoke by phone with Matt Levine, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who has been comprehensively reporting on and analyzing this story over the past month in his newsletter.