Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is bored again. How can you tell? Because he’s offering (threatening?) to buy Twitter. You know, because a totally normal thing to do is casually offer to spend nearly $40 billion on a lark, just to see what will happen. Most people took up knitting as a hobby during a pandemic, but trolling a corporation with a hostile takeover is certainly one way to kill some time.
On Thursday morning, Musk filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) his first and, he says, final offer to buy Twitter. He’s offering to buy up the social media platform for $54.20 per share, a solid premium over the company’s current stock price, and enough for the total price tag to reach $43 billion. Should the purchase go through, Musk is promising to take the company private in order to make wholesale changes to it (i.e., firing the staff en masse and installing his own regime). And if Twitter doesn’t take the deal, well, Musk says he might just have to sell all his shares — a threat that would likely drop Twitter’s share price, at least in the short term.
