Elon Musk intends to carry out his initial proposal to purchase Twitter for the agreed-upon price. The news comes weeks before Musk and Twitter were expected to head to court.
Elon Musk to buy Twitter: Here’s what we know
According to The Washington Post, the CEO’s legal team on Monday issued a letter to Twitter that may have ended the protracted legal battle over the merger that he attempted to stop in July 2022. In the letter, Musk agreed to pay the price he offered before trying to quit the deal.
In April 2022, Musk agreed to purchase Twitter for $54.20 (est. R964,27) per share, or roughly $44 billion (est. R783 billion). However, after the company’s valuation dropped along with other internet stocks and the overall market, Musk tried to back out of the agreement.
On Tuesday, 4 October 2022, Musk wrote in a tweet:
“Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
When the Tesla CEO first announced ambitions to purchase Twitter, he said that he wanted to rid the platform of spam accounts and keep it as a forum for free speech.
However, the billionaire resisted the purchase just a few weeks later. He mentioned that the number of fake accounts on the platform was higher than Twitter claimed.
The CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, denied the allegations, saying that Musk wanted out because he was concerned about the price.
The back-and-forth came after a dramatic decline in the value of technology stocks, notably Tesla, which Musk runs and which is the foundation of a large portion of his wealth.
The two sides engaged in lengthy court papers, private conversations, and acrimonious public spats on Twitter, where Musk has more than 100 million followers before the case was set to go to trial on Monday, 17 October 2022.
Elon is currently the wealthiest man in the world, with a net worth of more than $220 billion (est. R4 trillion).