Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share just weeks after becoming the largest shareholder in the social media company.
Mr. Musk said this was a “best and final offer,” representing a 54 percent premium over the day before he began investing in the company in late January, according to a filing from the Securities and Exchange Commission. It would value the company at about $43 billion.
If the offer is not accepted, Mr. Musk said he would “need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” according to a letter sent April 13 to Bret Taylor, the chairman of Twitter, and attached to the filing. “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I’ll unlock it.”
Twitter shares were up 11 percent in premarket trading.
On April 4, a registration application revealed that Mr. Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the world’s richest man, had purchased a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter. The next day, Twitter announced that Mr. Musk would join the board, but turned down the offer by the end of the week.
“I invested in Twitter because I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the world, and I believe that freedom of speech is a societal necessity for a functioning democracy,” Mr Musk said in the letter. to Mr Taylor. 13th of April.
“However, since I made my investment, I now realize that the company will not thrive in its current form and will not serve this societal need,” he wrote. “Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”
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