With businesses ranging from electric cars to personal rocket ships, iconoclastic billionaire Elon Musk has become the world’s richest man by building a fortune firmly planted in 21st century technology. With a $43 billion full cash offer to buy Twitter Inc., Musk may soon emulate a tycoon of the past by controlling a media platform that contributed to his rise to fame.
Musk, the chief executive of electric car maker Tesla, disclosed the takeover bid in a regulatory filing made public on Thursday and said he would take Twitter private.
Twitter ownership will be the next evolution of a polarizing figure. Musk has earned the admiration and wrath of Wall Street by combining the free-flowing passion of aerospace visionary Howard Hughes into a new model of a billionaire by his intense focus on revolutionizing auto production reminiscent of Henry Ford, What it is likely to pick up as short-sellers is to classify a red luxury sports car as it did in 2018.
“Whatever your sentiments about Musk will certainly shake things up, the only question is whether he will make things worse or improve them,” said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets.
Musk, 50, has an estimated net worth of $273.6 billion by Forbes which makes him the world’s richest person, worth $92.3 billion more than Amazon.com Inc. runner-up Jeff Bezos. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa to a Canadian mother. and a South African father and later attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1997.
He did not invent rockets or electric cars, nor did he found Tesla, which he has led since 2008. But his insight that Tesla’s electric cars should be high-performance machines with sophisticated, smartphone-style software that revolutionized the global auto business prompted a set-up. Companies like startup Rivian to try to catch up while encouraging new, all-electric competitors.
While many initially expected Tesla to fail – which it did during the roughly 2008-2009 financial crisis and 2017-2018 when Musk described the launch of his high-volume Model 3 sedan as “manufacturing hell” It was said – the company started earning quarterly profits in 2020.
Wall Street has underscored Tesla’s achievement by raising the company’s market capitalization to more than $1 trillion — more than all three Detroit automakers plus Toyota Motor Corp — and making it the fourth-largest company in the benchmark S&P 500 index. Which is the backbone of millions of people. of Americans’ retirement savings plans.
At the same time, his company SpaceX, which is led day by day by President Gwynne Shotwell, has elevated the incumbent of the space launch industry by developing rockets capable of putting satellites into space and returning them to Earth for reuse.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Musk has helped bring bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies into the mainstream, with Tesla boasting nearly $2 billion in bitcoin on its balance sheet, and Dogecoin being accepted as payment between the company.
Musk has gone through a trail of subordinates who could not keep pace or were fed up with his relentless demands. Even his biggest shareholders appeared to have lost patience with him at times. Famed stock picker Kathy Wood, whose outsized position in Tesla propelled her ARK Innovation ETF to the best performance of any US fund in 2020, suggested at a conference Tuesday that she should be put off by Musk’s “antiques” and have very little contact with them personally. ,
Labor advocates have criticized Musk for his hostility towards unions. Musk has also clashed with former business associates, state and federal regulators and Wall Street figures such as short seller Jim Chanos of Kinikos Associates. Chanos faced criticism from Musk for suggesting that Musk’s production estimates for Tesla and its tunneling business The Boring Company were unattainable.
Chanos told CNBC in 2018, “The thing that pisses me off isn’t the personal stuff and the personal attacks. I’m used to it. It’s the urge to say things that I think he knows is a stretch.” Yes, be polite.”
Musk has also faced his anger, tweeting in 2018 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1014800936198213633 that a reporter misled the public about Model 3 production and was “mean to me” Followed it up with the tweet “Birthday.
global reach
Twitter helped Musk become a household name. He has 81 million followers and has built a pop culture mass enough to help him host the venerable American comedy TV show “Saturday Night Live” in 2021.
A Twitter acquisition added Musk to a long line of American business tycoons who cemented their fortunes with media assets, from William Randolph Hearst in the late 19th century to the parent company of Jack Welch’s 1986 broadcast network NBC. Until the decision to buy, when he was the chief. General Electric executive.
Musk has used Twitter to get behind sellers big and small. He’s posted everything from dad jokes to polls about what he should do with his unrealistic gains from Tesla’s soaring stock price.
His Twitter content has been the source of an ongoing battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk is bound by a 2018 deal, with the agency requiring him to obtain pre-approval on certain Twitter posts, as he tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. The SEC said it defrauded investors, although the settlement did not include any admission or indication of innocence by Musk. Musk has since accused the SEC of “unbearable harassment.”
“Twitter has been tied to Musk’s global reach, which is why he feels so passionate about the platform,” said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. “But it’s a living nightmare for the Twitter board because unless they want to eat Sue for breakfast, they’ll have to find another bidder.”
(Reporting by David Randall; Additional reporting by Joseph White; Editing by Will Dunham)
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