Elon Musk offered to buy more of Twitter at the original price on Tuesday, just a few weeks before a bitter court case over his attempts to get out of the deal is set to start.
In a report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the richest person in the world said that he sent Twitter a letter in which he promised to keep the contract.
The latest turn in this long-running story happened before Twitter filed a high-stakes lawsuit to force Tesla’s boss to keep the deal he signed in April.
Concerns have been raised about the social networking site if Musk is in charge of it. Activists worry that it could lead to more abusive and false posts.
Early reports on Tuesday about Musk’s U-turn caused Twitter’s stock price to go up, which stopped trading. After the regulatory filing, trading began again.
A copy of the letter to Twitter that was sent to the SEC said, “We are writing to let you know that the Musk parties plan to close the deal.”
Twitter told AFP that it had received Musk’s letter and that it plans to buy the shares at the agreed-upon price of $54.20 per share.
Musk’s letter had a list of conditions, one of which was that the court stop the lawsuit against him. Later this week, Twitter’s lawyers were going to question him while he was under oath.
– Buying regret? –
“I think Musk knew he was not going to win that trial,” Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, told AFP.
Since he had buyer’s remorse, the question has been why he didn’t do his research before buying.
Musk, a serial entrepreneur who made a lot of money with Tesla electric cars, started to back out of the Twitter deal as soon as it was signed.
He said in July that he was backing out of the deal because Twitter had lied to him about how many fake “bot” accounts there were. The company denied these claims.
Twitter, meanwhile, has tried to show that Musk was making up reasons to leave because he had changed his mind.
In July, a judge in Delaware agreed to speed up a trial over Twitter’s claims, which the company said were hurting its business.
In an email, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said that Musk’s change of heart showed that he knew “this $44 billion deal was going to happen one way or another.”
The lawsuit says that Musk made an unsolicited offer to buy Twitter without asking for estimates on spam or fake accounts. He also made his offer more appealing to the board by getting rid of a due diligence requirement.
Analysts at Baird Equity Research said in a statement, “In the end, we won’t know why Elon changed his mind before trial. However, we think that there are details of the negotiations or legal process, such as the deposition, that he chose to keep private.” a message to investors.
– Freedom to speak out –
Many investors were surprised when Musk tried to buy Twitter. His supporters thought he was a genius who broke with tradition, while his critics thought he was a crazy megalomaniac.
He said he was a supporter of free speech and wanted the site to let Donald Trump back on. Trump was kicked off the site shortly after the former president’s attempts to overturn his election loss led to the storming of the US Capitol.
Angelo Carusone, the organization’s president, stated that Musk “made it plain that he will roll back Twitter’s community standards and safety guidelines, bring back Donald Trump and dozens of other accounts removed for violence and harassment, and open the floodgates of disinformation.” An Affair for America was a moderate degree of monitoring.
At the end of the day, Musk will convert Twitter into a chaotic mix of harmful conspiracy theories, political games, and harassment of workers.
Musk’s behaviour on Twitter goes against the rules. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has a history of making statements that go against or test the rules and sometimes get him in trouble with the law.
Just this past Monday, he got into a Twitter fight with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, over how to stop Russia’s invasion.
