By Adedapo Adesanya
Days after rejecting his appointment to the board of Twitter, the world’s richest man, Mr Elon Musk, is proposing to buy the social media network.
According to Bloomberg, he will offer $54.20 per share in cash, representing a 54 per cent premium over the January 28 closing price and a value of about $43 billion.
The social media company’s shares have so far soared close to 20 per cent on the news.
Mr Musk can conveniently buy Twitter as he is currently worth about $260 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, far higher than Twitter’s market valuation of about $37 billion.
In a letter to Twitter’s board, Mr Musk said he believes Twitter “will neither thrive nor serve [its free speech] societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed [into] a private company.”
The takeover is unlikely to be a drawn-out process.
“If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor (sic) do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” said Mr Musk.
Recently, the Tesla founder bought 73.5 million shares or 9.2 per cent of Twitter’s common stock for close to $3 billion, a move that saw him hold the largest shares. His announcement sent Twitter shares soaring more than 25 per cent.
After his initial stake became public, he immediately began appealing to fellow users about prospective moves, from turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter and adding an edit button for tweets to granting automatic verification marks to premium users. One tweet suggested Twitter might be dying, given that several celebrities with high numbers of followers rarely tweet.
Also, he could not hold more than 14 per cent sitting on the company’s board and many believe that this was why he later declined the offer.
“Elon has decided not to join our board,” Twitter CEO, Mr Parag Agrawal tweeted on Monday.
“Elon’s appointment to the board was to become officially effective 4/9, but Elon shared that same morning he will no longer be joining the board,” he said.
“I believe this is for the best,” he added.
Mr Musk has been outspoken about changes he would like to consider imposing on the social media platform, especially around freedom of speech.
