Tesla CEO wants to take over Twitter,
San Francisco tech billionaire Elon Musk is launching an attempt to buy Twitter. The head of the electric car manufacturer Tesla announced on Thursday an offer to buy all the shares of the short message service. The billionaire only announced last week that he owns 9.2 percent of Twitter, making him the largest single shareholder.
Musk is now offering all shareholders $54.20 per share, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The paper closed at just under $46 on Wednesday. The company would be valued at about $43 billion in the offering.
He wants to take Twitter off the stock market after an acquisition, Musk announced. Only in this way could the service be able to exploit its potential as a platform for freedom of speech, the 50-year-old argued. “My offer is the best and final offer,” Musk said on Thursday. “If it is not accepted, I would have to reconsider my position as a shareholder.“
The Tesla CEO has more than 80 million followers on Twitter and is one of the most popular users of the service. However, the chances of success of the takeover attack are unclear. Twitter has several financial investors as large shareholders, each holding between two to eight percent of the shares. It would therefore not be enough to convince only a few major shareholders of a sale.
That Musk could launch a takeover attack has already been suspected by observers after he knocked out a seat on the company’s board of directors over the weekend. According to an agreement with Twitter, he would have committed himself not to increase his share above 14.9 percent. The waiver of membership in the supervisory board, on the other hand, opened the door for Musk to buy more shares.
Twitter was last worth a good $36 billion in total. Musk is by far the richest person in the world – mainly thanks to his investments in the electric car manufacturer Tesla and the space company SpaceX. The financial service Bloomberg estimates his fortune at recent stock prices at about $ 260 billion.
