Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter a second time, but how did it all come to this?
The tech billionaire and founder of SpaceX first offered to buy Twitter for more than 40 billion dollars (£30.5 billion) back in April. On April 4 it was revealed Musk had purchased 9% of shares in the company, making him the largest shareholder.
On April 11 Musk announced that he had declined to join the board of directors for the social media, and submitted plans to buy the company and make it private three days later.
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Musk first offered 44 billion US dollars (£36.5 billion) in total, or 54.20 US dollars (£45) per share, and he and Twitter entered into negotiations on April 15. The deal was agreed 10 days later that Musk would purchase the company for $44bn.
Things took a turn in May, and on May 14 Musk begins to raise questions over the number of bot accounts on the platform and says the deal is “temporarily on hold” while he tries to find out more about the levels of spam and fake accounts on Twitter. Following this, Musk continues to spar publicly with Twitter executives, and on May 16 he sent a poo emoji in response to a tweet from Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal which reiterates the firm’s belief that only 5% of accounts on the site are bots.
Mr Musk also uses a public appearance later that day to suggest a deal for the platform could be done at a lower price and estimates that Twitter is, at best, 20% bots. The next day Musk claimed the deal “cannot move forward” until he gets “proof” that bots are only 5% of spam accounts on the platform. A number of experts suggest he is trying to force the renegotiation of the deal at a lower price.
Just under a month later, Musk said he had a “right to terminate the merger agreement” in a letter from his lawyers to Twitter’s legal team on 6 June over what he claims is the company’s lack of co-operation over the spam accounts data. Two days later Twitter agrees to give Mr Musk access to its data “firehose” which contains the data around all public tweets to help with his investigation.
A month later Musk sent a letter to he SEC saying he is terminating the acquisition, citing that Twitter has “not complied with its contractual obligations” surrounding the deal, namely giving him enough information to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform”. In response, the chair of Twitter’s board, Bret Taylor, said it is “committed” to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement.
On July 12 Twitter launched legal action, and Musk later countersued, accusing the company of misleading his team about the true size of its user base and other problems he said amounted to fraud and breach of contract. Judges later set a court date for October.
A month later, in a published court document, Twitter accused Mr Musk of “looking for an excuse” to get out of the deal, with the firm calling Mr Musk’s accusations “factually inaccurate, legally insufficient, and commercially irrelevant”. The two sides continued to tussle in the lead-up to the trial of the stalled takeover, which was due to heard by judges in the US later this month.
In late August, a former company executive at Twitter turned whistleblower, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, accused the microblogging website of having substantial security problems that place personal user data and potentially national security at risk. In response, Twitter disputed Mr Zatko’s account, adding that there was a “false narrative about Twitter and our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies”.
The company added that he had been sacked in January for “ineffective leadership and poor performance.”
Last night, Twitter confirmed that that Elon Musk has offered to buy the company for a second time, and that the deal would continue at the previously agreed price. A spokesperson for Twitter said: “We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC. The intention of the company is to close the transaction at 54.20 dollars per share.”
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