The board of Twitter has accepted $44bn takeover offer from billionaire Elon Musk. The TESLA CEO made the shock bid on April 14, calling it his ‘best and final offer’. The publicly traded firm will now become a private company owned by Musk, who negotiated a purchase price of $54.20 per-share
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement released by Twitter.”I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans.
“Twitter has a purpose and relevance that impacts the entire world. Deeply proud of our teams and inspired by the work that has never been more important,” the company’s CEO Parag Agrawal said in a tweet.
Musk, who has complained of overzealous moderation on the platform, bought a nine-percent stake in Twitter earlier in April, then offered to buy the whole company outright, citing a mission of preserving free speech.
Twitter’s board at first enacted an anti-takeover measure known as a poison pill that could have made a takeover attempt prohibitively expensive. But when Musk outlined the financial commitments he’d lined up to back his offer of 46.5 billion and no other bidders emerged the board opened negotiations with him.
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