Twitter: Elon Musk agrees to $44 billion buyout deal
Tech editor Dan Howley reports on Elon Musk's agreement to his original buyout proposal to Twitter amid litigation in chancery courts.
Video Transcript
RACHELLE AKUFFO: All right, well, let's get you up to speed now on Twitter. Shares remain halted amid reports that Tesla founder Elon Musk will go ahead with his $44 billion buyout. Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley has the details for us. Dan, quite the turnaround here.
DAN HOWLEY: That's right, Rachelle. This seems to be something that Elon Musk has done. Overnight, on Monday, according to reports, he filed a letter confidentially with the court in Delaware basically saying that he wants to move forward with this $44 billion takeover. That's $54.20 a share. Obviously, the 420 reference has to be in there because it's Elon Musk.
And so what this means now kind of remains to be seen. We don't know what kind of takeover it'll look like, whether or not Elon Musk will be CEO, if not, who he will install as CEO, and then what he'll do with the company itself. There's been various ideas that he's floated around when it comes to Twitter, whether that's the idea that it needs to have less moderation and allow more people onto the platform, stopping permanent bans, so things like former president Trump coming back to Twitter, and the like.
And then he also had discussed doing away with the advertising model, which is-- I don't know if you know this, but how Twitter makes money. So exactly how he would do that, I don't know. Sure, he's the richest person on Earth on any given day. But I don't know if he wants to just bankroll Twitter for years to come. So we'll have to see, really, what his takeover means. But for now, it really does remain to be seen.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: And interesting he's still keeping with that price tag at $54.20 a share. And a lot of people are wondering, well, does he have some leverage here? Was this just a sign that waiving due diligence and all these sort of antics back and forth, inevitably, he's going to end up buying this company then?
DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, that seems to be what some experts that Yahoo Finance has spoken to are saying. My-- our colleague, Alexis Keenan, had reached out to a professor at Case Western who said, you know, he's finally listening to his own attorneys at this point. There's no defense for him as far as the bot situation on the platform because he did waive that due diligence.
And he's obviously known about the bot situation, the text messages that we saw the other day that came forward. That specifically referenced or was specifically referenced in those messages. So it's not like he could say the bots weren't a problem that he didn't know about or were a problem he didn't know about. He did know about them. He was texting about them. So it could be at this point that it's just gotten so far along that he's going to try to pack it in and make sure that he doesn't have to go into this trial in a few weeks.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: Indeed, the ball in Twitter's court for now. A big thank you there, Dan Howley. Thanks so much.
