In less than 10 days of acquiring a huge stake in microblogging social media giant, Twitter, the World’s richest man Elon Musk has launched a hostile takeover by offering a “best and final” offer to buy out a 100% stake in Twitter Inc.
Attempt to launch a hostile takeover of Twitter
Musk has offered to pay $54.20 per share, according to the information available in a regulatory filing on Thursday. This price represents around a 38% premium to Twitter’s April 1 closing price.
The enterprise value of the company at this price works out to be around $43 billion. At the time of writing this article, Twitter’s shares shot up by 12% in premarket trading.
In a letter addressed to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor, Musk said, “Since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.
My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder”.
Musk also added that the company has extraordinary potential and he will unlock its true value. 50-year-old celebrity CEO of Tesla Inc is one of the most-watched firebrands on Twitter. He frequently tweets out memes and is very candid about changes he would like to bring to the platform.
Musk who has more than 80 million followers on Twitter was offered a board seat after he made the announcement of his stake in the company. However, he has declined the offer.
Reforms and Structural Changes proposed
Recently he made an appeal to fellow Twitterati about potential prospective moves like changing the company’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter, adding an edit option for tweets for a brief duration after it is posted, and granting automatic verification marks to premium users.
He also suggested in the latest tweet that the company is on its path to becoming obsolete as many high-profile celebrities with large followers hardly interact or tweet.
Most of these “top” accounts tweet rarely and post very little content.
Is Twitter dying? https://t.co/lj9rRXfDHE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2022
He even advocated for the removal of ads, which contribute to almost all of Twitter’s $3.7 billion in yearly revenue, and changes to its existing subscription plans.
Dan Ives, a Wedbush analyst who tracks Tesla closely, said, “This now goes from a Cinderella story with Musk joining the Twitter board to likely a Game of Thrones battle between Musk and Twitter”.
Shareholding in Twitter
Musk owns 73,486,938 equity shares of Twitter, which approximately turns out to be more than a 9% stake in the company. He is the single largest shareholder of Twitter. Musk has also confirmed that he will not raise his stake in the company by more than 14.9 percent in this period as per the securities exchange filing.
Musk’s estimated net worth is $260 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index.
The majority of his fortune is in Tesla shares, so if Musk indeed launches a takeover bid then he will have to either join hands with a private equity firm or some other financier to finance the deal.
Unlike other large tech companies like Met, Alphabet, Snapchat, etc, Twitter does not have dual shares class types. It will be really interesting to see how things pan out in the near future.
Stay hooked to our portal to know more about this developing story.
