Elon Musk made his proposal to buy Twitter outright and delist it from the stock market last week, and it appeared that the firm would kindly (or not so gently) decline. However, it appears that it did some more thinking after a few days and now officially stated that it is accepting Musk’s bid.
According to Twitter’s press release, the firm has now “entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk” The cash price is $54.20 per share (which means not shares in SEC-speak, and not actual cash, by the way). As a result, the transaction’s overall worth is estimated to be around $44 billion. Twitter will become a privately held corporation and its shares will no longer be traded on any stock market after the process is completed (which could take months due to the amount of regulatory scrutiny it will face).
After all, this was Musk’s original goal, and it appears to be working out very well for him. He’s paying a 38 percent premium over Twitter’s latest closing stock price when the company’s shares were last traded.
“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. “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. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it”, he continued.
Musk has gotten $25.5 billion in “fully committed debt and margin loan financing” and is funding the purchase with around $21 billion of his own money.
