Sold! Twitter accepts $44 billion offer from Elon Musk

Sold! Twitter accepts $44 billion offer from Elon Musk
Sold! Twitter accepts $44 billion offer from Elon Musk
Avatar of Harry Johnson
Written by Harry Johnson

Elon Musk today announced that he has succeeded in purchasing the social media platform Twitter at last.

Twitter’s board of directors was originally reluctant to accept the world’s richest man’s bid and even enacted a shareholders’ rights plan known as a ‘poison pill’ to protect the company from what it deemed a hostile takeover.

But earlier this week, reports emerged that Twitter executives had begun warming up to discussing the deal that culminated in the board accepting Musk’s $44 billion offer to take the firm private.

Announcing his purchase of Twitter, Musk issued the following statement:

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

Musk pitched the takeover bid for Twitter earlier this month at $54.20 per share, shortly after he bought a 9.2% share of the platform on April 4. Twitter shares at the time were trading below $40 per share.

Twitter shares have jumped by over 35% since Musk announced his acquisition plans. They were trading above $52 per share in early trading on Monday.

A regular on Twitter with over 81.5 million followers, Musk is notorious for his tweets, some of which have landed him in legal hot water.

In fact, his move to buy Twitter came shortly after US regulators announced they have authority to subpoena the Tesla CEO about his tweets and urged a federal judge not to let him tweet without supervision.

This prompted Musk to tweet that he is ‘giving serious thought’ to building his own social media platform. He made his bid for Twitter 20 days later.

About the author

Avatar of Harry Johnson

Harry Johnson

Harry Johnson has been the assignment editor for eTurboNews for mroe than 20 years. He lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, and is originally from Europe. He enjoys writing and covering the news.

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