Elon Musk is now officially Twitter’s new owner, ending months of costly litigation
Elon Musk #ElonMusk
Elon Musk is now the owner of Twitter.
Thursday evening, Twitter and Musk formally closed on the billionaire’s offer to take the company private by paying $54.20 per share, equal to about $44 billion, sources close to the deal told Insider. Musk made a U-turn on the offer in October, after spending months trying to pull out of the agreement. The same evening, Musk also ousted CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal the sources said.
Musk has been at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters this week, meeting with workers and holding impromptu discussions with them in the cafe, Insider reported. An all-hands meeting is expected to take place on Friday.
As a result of the new deal, Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk over the $44 billion purchase will come to an end after Twitter files for the case to be dismissed in the Delaware Court of Chancery, University of Michigan business law professor Erik Gordon said.
A Delaware judge gave the two parties until October 28 to reach an agreement outside of court or face a five-day trial in October — one experts say Musk was likely to lose.
Representatives for Twitter and Musk did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Musk first agreed in late April to buy Twitter. By the start of May, he was privately expressing reservations about the deal he’d signed and soon tweeted it was was “on hold,” launching months of back and forth over seemingly pretextual claims about “bots” or inauthentic accounts on Twitter.
While Musk said in an initial statement on the acquisition that he wanted to control Twitter, in part, to “defeat the spam bots,” he proceeded to claim the problem was worse than Twitter had let on, amounting to fraud and allowing him to walk away from the company. He sent a letter to Twitter at the start of July, purporting to terminate the acquisition. Twitter promptly sued him in Delaware Court of Chancer. The case was set for a five-day trial beginning Oct. 17, but the trial was temporarily halted after Musk backtracked on his plan to walk away from the deal.