Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion in cash on Monday, making him the world’s richest person. The deal will give him control of the social media platform, which has millions of users and world leaders, making him the richest person in the world.
For the 16-year-old company, this is a big moment. It helped them become one of the world’s most important public squares, but now they face a lot of problems.
Talks about the deal, which seemed to be in doubt last week, sped up over the weekend after Tesla CEO Elon Musk wooed Twitter shareholders with financing details of his offer.
Twitter started talking to Tesla CEO Elon Musk about buying the company at the proposed $54.20 per share price because they were under a lot of stress.
It’s important for people to be able to speak freely in order for a democracy to work, and Twitter is the digital town square where important issues are debated.
Shares rose about 6% after the news. The deal is almost 40% more than the closing price on the day before Musk said he had bought more than 9% of the company. Even so, the offer is below the $70 range where Twitter was trading last year, but it’s still a good deal.
Afterward, shareholders will decide whether or not the deal goes through.
In a statement, the company said that Musk got $25.5 billion in debt and margin loan financing and that he is giving the company a $21 billion equity commitment.
At first, the breakup fee and who would run the new company was not clear.
The 50-year-old CEO of rocket company SpaceX, Elon Musk, says he wants to fight trolls on Twitter, and he wants to cut the price of the Twitter Blue premium subscription service and stop advertising.
On Twitter, the billionaire, a strong supporter of cryptocurrencies, has also talked about adding dogecoin as a way to pay.
Until April, Twitter’s shares had dropped about 10% since CEO Parag Agrawal took over from founder Jack Dorsey in late November. Musk revealed that he had a stake in the company at that point in April.
Having too much weight
It’s a big surprise that Twitter plays such a big role as a way for politicians, political dissidents, and activists to talk, because it’s so small.
The Arab Spring and the storming of the U.S. Capitol have both been linked to the small social media platform, even though it isn’t as big as the bigger platforms like Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook.
In a tweet, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, “A lot of people are going to be very unhappy with West Coast high tech as a de facto arbiter of free speech.”
News that Tesla CEO Elon Musk might buy Twitter excited Republicans on Monday. They thought Trump would return to the service.
