With a ruthless chess hit, Elon Musk, already the largest single shareholder of Twitter, made the formal proposal to buy 100% of the blue canary’s social network, which will now have to consider what is an ultimate proposal.
Recent times have proved to be full of surprising news for Twitter, and not only on a functional level, with continuous storms on the side of the management and the shareholding, which may not have ended yet.
When in 2020 the Elliott Management Corporation fund scrapped about 4% of Twitter’s shareholding, investing $ 1 billion, then CEO Jack Dorsey was questioned, given that, being also owner and CEO of Square, now Block, he could have distracted himself from the direction of the blue canary’s microblog. A compromise situation was reached, with the establishment of objectives to be achieved which, in the long run, worked as pressure, leading Dorsey to resign in favor of the current CEO, Parag Agrawal who, however, may not stay in the saddle for so long. as it was thought.
Recently, Elon Musk bought, for almost $ 3 billion, 9.2% of shares, after the value of the social had dropped due to some of his statements regarding freedom of expression on the platform: the proposal to sit in the Board of Directors, Musk (to date the largest single shareholder of the company), replied with a “no thanks”, keeping – according to some – his hands free for a further climb, given that by accepting the proposed assignment he would have had to stop around the 14%.
The forecast in question turned out to be exact in the past few hours, when Musk sent to the SEC, the supervisory authority of the American Stock Exchange (a sort of overseas Consob), a documentation containing the contents of a letter addressed to Bret Taylor, programmer, entrepreneur and current president of the Twitter board.
In the letter, Musk made official his proposal to buy 100% of Twitter, making it a private company, paying $ 54.20 in cash for each share, with a premium of + 54% compared to the value of Twitter’s shares set the day before he. invested in it, and + 38% compared to the day before his investment was made public.
The reason given for the proposal, which appears to be nothing short of ultimate (“My offer is my best and last and if it is not accepted I will have to reconsider my position as shareholder”), was that Musk realized that, in the its current form, Twitter will not be able to fulfill its mission, which is to contribute to freedom of expression, an essential paradigm for a modern democracy.
In the process that separates Musk from the control of Twitter, the young entrepreneur will also have to face the “shoals” of a class action since, instead of providing the SEC with all the documentation relating to his first investment on March 24th, he would have done so with 11 days late, only April 4th after.