Twitter Is Still Committed To Their $44 Billion Deal With Elon Musk, Regardless Of What He’s Saying
Well, it’s been almost a month since Elon Musk decided to live out his real-life Dr. Evil fantasy and buy Twitter for (dramatic music crescendo and aggressive zoom-in) $44 billion dollars. If you’re a person who uses Twitter, you may be wondering why the platform still generally feels the same as it did prior to Elon’s little takeover, and that would be because Elon hasn’t taken over shit yet. Elon and Twitter’s previous shareholders are still working out the details of his deal, which sort of began to slow down on Elon’s end. Elon started looking for excuses for why he couldn’t complete payment on his purchase, like how he’s hesitant to own Twitter until he finds out just how many accounts are spambots first. But Twitter doesn’t care about how Elon chooses to drag his feet on this thing. They just want to see the deal done because they’re not backing out.
Elon has claimed that his goal of turning Twitter into a right-wing hate-filled paradise center for free speech has been temporarily put on hold, just until he’s able to get to the bottom of Twitter’s fraudulent accounts problem. Some think that Elon is going to back out, but according to Yahoo! Finance, Twitter can enact a clause in the contract and force the deal to go through IF Elon’s got his financing in place and certain conditions are met. If Elon can’t get his financing together, he’ll have to pay a $1 billion breakup fee to end the deal. Twitter said in a statement that they are committed to seeing the deal through.
Twitter said it plans to complete its $44 billion merger agreement with Elon Musk, even as the Tesla CEO appears to dither on the deal.
“Twitter is committed to completing the transaction on the agreed price and terms as promptly as practicable,” it said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing published Tuesday night, referring to Musk’s offer to take the company private.
“We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement,” the board also told Bloomberg in a statement. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment when approached by Insider.
Things could get potentially very messy here, as Elon is claiming he can’t let the deal go through unless Twitter is able to prove to him that the spam accounts on Twitter make up less than 5% of all user accounts. But Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has claimed that Twitter “isn’t perfect” at catching spambots, so the exact number can’t really ever be known. It’s true. Half the time when I go back and look at my old tweets, I’ll catch myself wondering if it really was a human brain that wrote that incoherent sentence. So, differentiating between the scammers and the barely-literate dummies is not an exact science.
But if we’re laying it all on the table here, there also might be an issue with money. Elon came in guns blazing to buy Twitter out from under everyone, whether shareholders were into it or not. Then after the deal was done, and Tesla’s stock began to dip, Elon started to get a little weird about it. And he’s already getting that money panic one gets when they realize they might have fucked over their wallet. According to The Washington Post, Elon isn’t just demanding Twitter show him who the fake bots are, but he’s also expressed that he’d be open to re-negotiating that $44 billion sale price down a bit. The Post adds that Twitter could sue Elon if he starts making up arbitrary reasons for why he can’t buy the platform and just decides to walk away from the deal.
Tesla stock continues to drop, which might be impacting the cash Elon has to pay for Twitter. But he needs as much money as possible so he can honor his contract and buy Twitter. Hmm…it’s almost like buying a social media platform for several billion dollars was an impulse purchase that is turning out to bite Elon in the ass. Oh well! That contract says Elon better make with the money, and Twitter wants it soon. So if you see Elon Musk walking up to a Coinstar machine with an empty Folgers coffee can marked “Loose Couch Change,” you’ll know why.
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