The board of microblogging giant, Twitter, has accepted the buyout offer of $44 billion from Tesla’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, to buy the company and take it private, the social media company confirmed on Monday.
The announcement effectively ends the controversy generated by Musk’s initial offer to buy the company at $54.20 per share, which translated to $43 billion, a few days after buying 9.2 percent of the company’s shares to become the single largest shareholder.
Musk’s first offer did not say at the time how he would finance the acquisition which made the Twitter board seek to fend off a hostile takeover by adopting a so-called “poison pill” that that could make a takeover attempt prohibitively expensive.
However, after initiating talks with the Musk team on Monday, the Twitter board came out with an announcement that it is selling the platform to the SpaceX owner in a deal valued at $44 billion.
“Twitter, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company,” the company said.
While announcing the news in a statement shortly after successfully taking over the company, Musk said:
“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.
“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 tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
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