Who desires to personal Twitter? Perhaps Elon Musk would not. Positive, possibly he’s inflicting chaos to extract a cheaper price from the Twitter board, however he simply as effectively might stroll away altogether and create a Twitter clone. There’s a “60%+ likelihood from our view Musk in the end walks from the deal and pays the breakup price,” analyst Dan Ives mentioned Tuesday.
However for now the board is making an attempt to carry him to it. On Tuesday morning, hours after Musk tweeted that “this deal can not transfer ahead” till his purported spam bot issues are cleared up, the corporate filed its proxy assertion for Musk’s takeover and mentioned it desires to shut the deal “as promptly as practicable.”
The board, in different phrases, desires to rid itself of Twitter. I obtained a brand new assertion from the board Tuesday night time that learn, “The Board and Mr. Musk agreed to a transaction at $54.20 per share. We consider this settlement is in one of the best curiosity of all shareholders. We intend to shut the transaction and implement the merger settlement.” Key phrases: “Implement the merger settlement.” Authorized motion appears probably.
However what if Musk pays to make this deal go away? What’s going to change into of the social community the media likes to hate? “Because it appears there is a respectable likelihood Elon pulls out of the Twitter deal, who else can be in line to purchase up the items (at a a lot larger low cost)? My white knight guess is Microsoft,” Techdirt’s Mike Masnick
wrote Tuesday. He mentioned “I feel that on the finish of this course of, it will likely be tough for Twitter to stay an ongoing concern as its personal entity” as a result of “the board clearly has no clue what to do with it…”
On the within
Twitter staff are feeling each conceivable emotion — exhaustion, defensiveness, protectiveness, and all the remaining. A few of it’s evident on Twitter. Lara Cohen, Twitter’s international head of companions, tweeted about Musk with out naming him,
saying “The way in which some media shops cowl him, and do headlines simply bc he ‘mentioned’ one thing (whether or not it is authorized or factually correct or potential or not) is SO trump 2016 protection it is painful to look at.”
Matt Levine’s must-read column
It is titled “Elon Musk Does Not Care About Spam Bots.” The Bloomberg Opinion columnist mentioned “it is very important be clear” that Musk “is mendacity:” Disputes about spam bots “will not be why he’s backing away from the deal, as you may inform from the truth that the spam bots are why he did the deal.”
“Twitter might get all 229 million of its monetizable each day energetic customers in a room and have them say ‘hiya Elon, we’re actual,’ and that might not persuade him, as a result of he doesn’t need to be satisfied,” Levine wrote. “He desires to pay a cheaper price…”
