Elon Musk - latest: Tesla boss ‘will become Twitter CEO when deal is complete’ as billionaires throw cash behind takeover
The billionaire has received $7.1 billion from supporters
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Elon Musk has received $7.1 billion from nearly two dozen investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others to fund his purchase of Twitter.
The news comes after the billionaire sold nearly $8.5bn worth of Tesla stock.
Qatar - giving $375,000,000 - and Saudi Arabia will also be financing the deal.
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman of the board at Kingdom Holding Company and one of Twitter’s largest backers, said he is rolling over his current investment after initially criticising Mr Musk.
Mr Musk will pay $54.20 cash per share for the San Francisco-based company, which will now be taken private before the end of October.
The board announced it had reached a deal with Mr Musk on Monday, and that it represented a 38 per cent premium from Twitter’s closing price on 1 April, the day before the world’s richest person made his move for the company by announcing his nine per cent stake.
Mr Musk will likely make some significant changes to the social media platform, having made several hints in recent months about what his intentions are. It comes after Musk’s friend Dorsey stepped down as CEO and Parag Agrawal took over.
Changes could include a new CEO, worker layoffs and even monetising tweets by charging publishers to embed them, according to some reports.
You can follow all the latest news and developments right here.
Twitter has been miscounting its users
Twitter has also been overstating the number of daily users on its service for the past, overcounting by up to 1.9 million users each quarter, in news that broke following its quaterly earnings.
The error was due to Twitter counting multiple accounts as active when they were all owned by one user - even if they were not in use.
Twitter announces quarterly results
Twitter has just posted its quarterly earnings, revealing a 16 per cent increase in users and a revenue of $1.2 billion.
The first three months of the year saw the San Francisco company receive an average 229 million daily active users - though this doesn’t take into account any impactf Musk’s involvement with the platform might have had. His 9.2 per cent stake, followed by his takeover bid, were all revealed in April.
You can read more here:
Twitter revenue and daily users increase amid Elon Musk takeover
Twitter’s revenue has reached $1.2bn and daily users increased 16 per cent amid Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media company.
Elon Musk unable to escape SEC ‘b******s’
Elon Musk is still facing the consequences of a tweet he made four years ago about taking Tesla private at $4.20 a share.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission forced him to pay a fine at the time, as well as have all future tweets about Tesla to be checked by a lawyer before he posts them. He claims it infringes his free speech, calling the regulators “bastards” at a recent TED event, but a federal judge just denied that the agreement be scrapped.
You can read the full story here.
Twitter reportedly tells advertisers it will be safe for brands even after Musk takes over
A new report from the Financial Times suggsts that Twitter has written to agencies to reassure them that their ads are not placed alongside harmful or offensive content. Twitter declined to comment.
“Twitter has made some strides in tackling online hate and extremism in recent years, and so while we want to be cautiously optimistic about how Elon Musk will run the platform, he has not demonstrated any focus on these issues to date,” Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League which organised a boycott against Facebook in 2020, said. “We worry that he could take things in a very different direction.”
Concerns have come from Mr Musk’s claim that he is a “free speech absolutist”, as content like hate speech and other abusive posts are permitted under the First Amendment - and Mr Musk has said that Twitter “should match the laws of the country and really there’s an obligation to do that”
Could Tesla put the Twitter deal in jeopardy?
Tesla shareholders are concerned the deal could mean Elon Musk selling a large number of Tesla shares.
Part of the money is raised using loans, but $21bn of the equity will need to be provided by Mr Musk himself.
However, Tesla shares are falling - 12.2 per cent from just over $1tn to $906bn.
“If Tesla’s share price continues to remain in freefall that will jeopardise his financing,” Oanda senior market analyst Ed Moya told the BBC.
Elon Musk putting the cocaine back in Coca-Cola
For his next trick, Musk jokes he’s going to put the cocaine back in Coca-cola (The first publicly sold bottle of Coca-Cola in 1894 apparently contained around 3.5 grams of cocaine.)
When someone shared a photoshopped tweet claiming he was going to buy McDonald’s and “fix all of the ice cream machines”, Musk replied: “Listen, I can’t do miracles OK.”
Musk loses legal battle
Elon Musk’s lawyers had sought to terminate a 2018 consent decree that resolved SEC securities fraud charges following a tweet that announced that he was thinking about taking Tesla private at $420 (£327) a share, adding that he had “funding secured”.
The tweets, which were found to have no basis according to regulators, caused market fluctuation and as a result, the SEC charged Musk for “misleading investors”.
Mr Musk argued that having to have his tweets checked by lawyers - a subsequent penalty for his action alongside a $20 million fine - “crossed the line into harassment” and impeded his constitutional right to free speech.
However, Judge Lewis Liman inrejected those arguments.
“Musk cannot now seek to retract the agreement he knowingly and willingly entered by simply bemoaning that he felt like he had to agree to it at the time but now — once the specter of the litigation is a distant memory and his company has become, in his estimation, all but invincible — wishes that he had not,” wrote Liman.
Twitter says mass account deactivations after Musk takeover was 'organic'
ICYMI: Following the announcement that Tesla chief Elon Musk would buy out Twitter, several high-profile accounts including that of former president Barack Obama, and singers Katy Perry and Taylor Swift saw a drop in followers by hundreds of thousands.
The social media company has now confirmed that these account closures were largely “organic” and not from the automated deactivation of bots and fake accounts.
“While we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to largely be a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation,” Twitter said in a statement.
Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout in full
ICYMI: The comprehensive filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission contains more than 46,000 words - the length of a short novel - but reading through it there are some interesting titbits.
Among them is a clause that Twitter must stop actively looking for a new or alternative buyer, but if one approaches with a better offer, then it can be considered. If Twitter breaks off the deal with Elon Musk, it will need to pay him $1 billion. Specifically, if “Twitter terminates the Merger Agreement to allow Twitter to enter into a definitive agreement for a competing acquisition proposal that constitutes a Superior Proposal.”
The full filing on the SEC website can be found here.
Does Elon Musk buying Twitter put you off using it?
ICYMI: With hundreds of thousands of people appearing to quit Twitter after news broke that Elon Musk had bought it, we’re running a reader poll to see how the buyout has changed user opinion.
We’ll have the results for you as soon as we have them.
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