When Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share or $43 billion, he said he
was: “Not playing the back-and-forth game”
He was moving “straight to the end”
And this was his “best and final offer” in the Securities and Exchange Commission
filing.
Twitter’s board tried to stop him in his tracks by adopting a so-called “poison pill”
to make it harder for Musk to buy the company.
Under this structure, shareholders are allowed to purchase newly offered shares at a discount,
except for the person trying to acquire the company, in this case, Musk.
He’d have to purchase the new shares at a higher price, so it’s a measure to stop
him from taking over more shares of the platform as soon as he hits 15%.
He currently owns 9%.
Musk is said to be fighting back with a plan of his own.
He is reportedly speaking with investors who could partner with him in his bid for Twitter.
One option according to the New York Post is to team up with private equity firm Silver
Lake’s Co-CEO Egon Durban, a Twitter board member who led Musk’s effort to take Tesla
private.
The Tesla CEO is apparently also threatening to appeal directly to shareholders.
He sent out a cryptic tweet over the weekend, “Love Me Tender” in reference to an Elvis
Presley song.
It could mean that he’ll bypass the board and invite shareholders to sell - or “tender”
- their stock to him at a premium so they’ll make a lot of money.
But what does he want with Twitter in any case?
I mean the guy already builds electric cars and envisions trips to Mars.
Given his professed mission to ‘save the world’, it may actually make sense.
If his goal is to save the world in one way or another, he sees his purchase of Twitter
as a way of saving democracy.
He feels Twitter is not living up to its promise of being a platform for free speech - which
he calls “a societal imperative for a functioning democracy” in the SEC filing.
He said at a recent TED event that a good way to tell if free speech exists is to ask
this question: “Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like?”
In the past few years, Twitter has started fact-checking and suspending accounts.
It most famously banned Donald Trump over his tweets surrounding the 2021 Capitol riots.
Musk’s patience with Twitter apparently ran out when it suspended the account of news
satire site The Babylon Bee which named U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel
Levine its “Man of the Year” after USA Today named the transgender official one of
its “Women of the Year”.
Babylon Bee’s CEO Seth Dillon said Musk reached out to confirm their account had in
fact been suspended.
Dillon said Musk “even mused on that call that he might need to buy Twitter.”
Purchasing his go-to social media platform is certainly easier than starting his own
social media platform which he said he has seriously considered.
So, what will Twitter look like under new ownership?
Will the former president be welcomed back?
We’ll have to see.
During the recent TED interview, Musk suggested bans should be done with caution.
And that timeouts are better than banning people permanently.
He suggested that when it comes to determining if offensive tweets should be removed, the
policy should always be to let the tweets remain if there are any doubts.
So when in doubt, leave it in, don’t take it out.
Musk has criticized Twitter’s secret algorithm which it uses to decide what to show you on
your feed.
He said the algorithm should be open-sourced so the public can inspect the underlying code
behind the algorithm to ensure there's no manipulation behind the scenes to promote
some tweets over others.
So basically, you’d know whether something was done to promote or demote a tweet.
He wants an edit button so people can revise their comments and also wants to eliminate
spambots and scam bots.
Under his leadership, ads could be a thing of the past.
He has taken aim at Twitter’s revenue model which relies on advertising.
Not everyone is happy about an Elon Musk takeover, including some Twitter employees and a Saudi
prince and Twitter shareholder.
Musk shot back by asking for the Saudi Arabian kingdom’s views on free speech.
The country is known to crack down on freedom of expression.
Others were reportedly already worried about him joining the board, let alone buying Twitter.
Musk abruptly canceled his plans to join the company’s board which is made up of the
current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, and independent
directors.
In the SEC filing, he stated flatly: “I don’t have confidence in management”
A former SEC chair explained that joining the Board could have limited his influence.
Jay Clayton told CNBC:
"When you go on the board of directors of a company, your degrees of freedom as an investor
are substantially restricted.”
So instead of joining the board, he decided he wanted to buy the whole shebang.
Twitter has over 200 million daily users - two-thirds
of the size of the US population.
Some of its users have been described as “woke”.
An ideology Musk has blasted.
In an interview with the Babylon Bee, he said:
“Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal which is not cool.
Trying to shut down Chappelle, come on, man, that’s crazy.”
He’s referencing the attempt to cancel comedian Dave Chapelle over transgender remarks in
his Netflix special.
He continued: “Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and
hate basically?
At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful.
It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.”
But while Musk is presenting himself as the king of free speech, others accuse him of
hypocrisy.
In February, Tesla employee John Bernal said he was fired from his job after posting reviews
critical of Tesla’s full self-driving software on his YouTube channel, AI Addict.
In 2018, a blogger who wrote not-so-flattering articles about Tesla said Musk threatened
to sue if he continued writing articles.
His critics don’t see the richest man in the world as the savior of free speech.
By the way, how on earth will he pay for it?
Most of his money is tied up in Tesla stock.
Although he recently sold billions of dollars’ worth of shares he had to pay billions in
taxes.
And he gave billions to charity.
Musk hired Morgan Stanley as an advisor for the bid according to the regulatory filing.
Banks are often brought on board to help with debt financing.
Having already become the rocket man, an electric car entrepreneur, a builder of tunnels and
brain-computer chips, he appears determined to be a social media mogul as well.
He already has the best and brightest engineers at his disposal if Twitter needed more engineering
chops.
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