- The meeting that began on Sunday and has continued this Monday is resolved with the closing of the operation. The richest man in the world and CEO of Tesla takes control of this social network.
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| Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and new owner of Twitter. |
Elon Musk buys Twitter. The technology firm accepts the offer of the CEO of Tesla and the richest man in the world. After a negotiation that began early on Sunday and continued on Monday, the businessman takes over one of the most popular social networks for 44,000 million dollars.
The Board of Directors has valued Musk's barrage once he exposed last Thursday a financing plan worth 46,500 million dollars between loans, lines of credit, and his own assets. He is backed by Morgan Stanley, the same investment bank that oversaw Tesla's IPO and which in turn is among the main shareholders of Twitter itself (and Tesla), only below Musk himself, with around 9.2 % of the shares as it has been known this month, and of the discreet Vanguard fund, present in technology firms such as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft or Tesla itself.
Negotiations began on Sunday lasted until late at night and continued on Monday, finally closing the deal. The world's largest fortune, with more than 200,000 million dollars under his belt according to the Forbes list, has gotten away with it after testing the acquisition in the middle of this month at 54.20 dollars per share. On Friday, according to sources consulted by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, he had paved the way with contacts with some of the company's shareholders. The 50-year-old South African had already dropped that if the Board of Directors did not listen to him, he could go directly to the company's shareholders to obtain the acquisition.
"I hope that even my biggest detractors stay on Twitter because that's what freedom of expression means," Musk tweeted this Monday when the listing of the Californian company had not yet been interrupted, which improved 5.5 % in the Wall Street session. Hours later it was known that the operation had been successfully closed.
Musk has relied on Morgan Stanley to appraise the purchase, the same investment bank that back in 2010 supervised Tesla's IPO. The electric car maker is currently valued at more than $1 trillion, with 17% of the stake held by Musk himself. These actions serve precisely to guarantee the loan of 12,500 million that, together with lines of credit of 13,000 million and personal assets of Musk worth 21,000 million, reach 46,500 million of the financial plan presented to the US Securities Market Commission ( SEC for its acronym in English).
Twitter lost 221 million dollars last year despite entering 5,077 million dollars (main thanks to its advertising business), and Musk is determined to undertake many changes in the platform of which he is a regular user, with freedom of expression as a flag and his own proposals such as enabling the editing of tweets already published. The SEC itself has made the entrepreneur's use of this social network ugly on more than one occasion, with more or less credible messages that have led to altering, for example, the value of the listed Tesla.