Highlights
- The Tesla CEO at first proposed to continue with the deal as earlier
- In response, Twitter said it intends to close the transaction at $54.20 per share
- Musk has been trying to back out of the deal for several months
Twitter on Tuesday (US time) confirmed receiving a letter by Elon Musk, stating he will go through the deal he signed early this year to buy the platform for USD 44 billion.
The development was confirmed through the official account of Twitter Investor Relations, which read, "Twitter issued this statement about today's news: We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC. The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share."
The Tesla CEO at first proposed to continue with the deal as earlier, at the originally agreed-on price of $44 billion.
In response, Twitter said it intends to close the transaction at $54.20 per share.
Trading in Twitter’s stock, which had been halted for much of the day pending the release of the news, resumed trading late Tuesday and soared 22 per cent to close at $52.
Musk’s proposal was the latest twist in a high-profile saga involving the world’s richest man and one of the most influential social media platforms. Much of the drama has played out on Twitter itself, with Musk — who has more than 100 million followers — lamenting that the company was failing to live up to its potential as a platform for free speech and had too many bots.
Elon Musk's war with Twitter
Musk has been trying to back out of the deal for several months after signing on to buy the San Francisco company in April. Shareholders have already approved the sale and legal experts say Musk faced a huge challenge to defend against Twitter’s lawsuit, which was filed in July.
Musk claimed that Twitter under-counted the number of fake accounts on its platform. Twitter sued Musk when he announced the deal was off.
Musk’s argument largely rested on the allegation that Twitter misrepresented how it measures the magnitude of “spam bot” accounts that are useless to advertisers. Most legal experts believe he faced an uphill battle to convince Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, the court’s head judge, that something changed since the April merger agreement that justifies terminating the deal.
Musk’s main argument for terminating the deal — that Twitter was misrepresenting how it measured its “spam bot” problem — also didn’t appear to be going well as Twitter had been working to pick apart Musk’s attempts to get third-party data scientists to bolster his concerns.
Musk remained mum about the turn of events on Twitter until late Tuesday afternoon, when he tweeted that “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app” without further explanation.
Many of Musk’s other tweets in the past 24 hours have been about a divisive proposal to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, drawing the ire of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Also Read | Elon Musk slammed by Ukrainian officials over tweets on Russia
