The company said in a statement Monday that investors would receive $54.2 for each Twitter share. The price is 38% higher than the stock’s close on April 1, the last trading day after Musk disclosed a significant stake in the company, sparking a stock rally.
️ YES!!! ♥️💫🚀 https://t.co/0T9HzUHuh6
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 1650915802000
Twitter shares were closed for the news. “Free speech is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters important to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in the statement.
“Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and community of users to unlock it.” Its CEO Parag Agarwal tweeted, “Twitter has a purpose and relevance that impacts the entire world.”
“Deeply proud of our teams and inspired by work that has never been more important.”
The all-cash deal is expected to be completed by the end of this year. According to the statement, Musk secured $25.5 billion of debt and margin debt financing and will provide approximately $21 billion of equity to fund the deal.
Going private is a dramatic turning point for a company that got its start as a messaging service for sharing its status updates with friends, but made short posts of 140 characters or less public for people to share. became a way of broadcasting
Twitter caught fire among politicians, celebrities and journalists, and along with social media giants Facebook and YouTube, took its place as the standard bearer of a new, more interactive way of using the web known as Web 2.0. Took it
Musk, one of Twitter’s most prolific users with more than 83 million followers, began accumulating a stake of about 9% in January. By March, he had intensified his criticism of Twitter, alleging that the company’s algorithms are biased and feeds with automated junk posts. He also suggested that Twitter’s user growth was sped up by bots. After declining an invitation to join the company’s board, on April 14 he offered to take Twitter private, saying he would make the platform a bastion of free speech and other indications about changes to the owner. will leave
The ideas range from the practical – say, letting users edit tweets and combating the spread of bots – to the peculiar, such as a proposal to turn the company’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter.
Following its birth in 2006, the company faced a series of crises, including a management turmoil that saw the ouster of co-founder Jack Dorsey during Twitter’s early days, and his eventual return in 2015. After an initial public offering in 2013, the company considered a sale. In 2016, attracting interest from companies ranging from The Walt Disney Company to Salesforce Inc.
Dorsey engaging with an active investor in 2020 forced Twitter to set specific growth targets and add more board accountability. This served as a catalyst for Dorsey’s eventual departure to focus on his other company, digital-payments company Block Inc. As recently as last week, there was little clarity. The day it was announced that the 50-year-old billionaire himself had attended a TED event, even he had doubts about its prospects.