On April 25, Silicon Valley Iron Man, legendary industrialist and Tesla leader Musk officially reached an acquisition agreement with Twitter for $44 billion, and the privatization of Twitter can be completed within this year. This speed is so fast that I have not reacted, is not, the 14th only released the news to engage in acquisition, 10 days more than a little negotiated, the price also rose by 1 billion, so rich and powerful? However, people also said very clearly in the interview: "Hey, I didn't buy Twitter to make money, and I didn't care about any economic problems." ”
It sounded familiar, but at the same time another piece of news caught my attention, just the day before the acquisition agreement was negotiated, four astronauts involved in the private commercial space mission Ax-1 on the International Space Station returned to Earth safely aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which is also Musk's industry. At this time, the sudden reaction, Musk already has a large number of industries covering aerospace, energy, transportation, artificial intelligence, etc., and now spends a lot of money to buy Twitter, since he does not care about money, what does he care about?
Today we will start from this acquisition and talk about why Musk wants to buy Twitter so much?
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【The following is the video text version】
On March 20, a conservative media in the United States was banned by Twitter in the name of committing "hateful acts", and the object of "hatred" was Rachel Levine, a transgender woman who is currently the assistant secretary of the US Department of Health. And this media is actually "bold" yin and yang weird she is "male of the year", proper political incorrect ah, you bully a transgender person, is not bullying LGBTQIAPKD these "minority" groups! Can't help but who do you forbid? But this made Musk, who held high the banner of free speech, unhappy, and immediately contacted the head of the "victim media" and said that it was time to buy Twitter. Immediately after the poll was organized, according to Musk himself, free speech is essential to the functioning of democracy, and Twitter's algorithm will make "bias" seriously affect public opinion, which led to today's situation. It can be said that he is firmly standing on the moral high ground of public opinion, and a wave of operations has increased his fan base by nearly 1.5 million.
But I'm sorry, just that paragraph everyone can forget, the above words are just the momentum he created for the acquisition plan. According to the information released by the media later, Musk began to "quietly" buy twitter shares as early as the end of January this year. Because Twitter's stock price during this period is in a historical trough, saying that it is late and fast, Musk has eaten a lot, and by mid-March he has more than 5% of the shares, but according to the regulations, he should disclose his share ratio to the US Securities and Exchange within 10 days, but this will inevitably affect the stock price!
So guess what? People happened to "miss" this reporting time, and "forced" to continue to eat more stocks at a very low price. It wasn't until April 4 that Musk provided disclosure documents to the SEC, when he learned that he had bought more than 73 million outstanding shares of Twitter, accounting for 9.2% of the total shares (revised to 9.1% when changing the attributes of investors in the day), second only to 10.3% of vanguard, the largest shareholder of public fund giant Vanguard, becoming Twitter's largest passive individual investor, simply put, "super retail".
This kind of black box operation forced some investors to sue Musk at that time, but also affected by this, Twitter's stock price soared by 27%, the company's board of directors eyes are straight, how many years, when has there been such a good trend? So stabilized the mood, immediately sent the CEO to personally negotiate with Musk, welcome him to join the board of directors family and enter into an agreement, as long as you promise that the future shares will not exceed 14.9%, no matter what ideal can always be realized together, Musk also readily agreed. But it was clear how he could be happy to be a shareholder with restricted equity, so he thought about it for a few days and announced his refusal to join Twitter's board on April 9, and two days later resubmitted the filing to remove the commitment to the shareholding restriction.
By April 14, Musk was out of the way, revising the filing again to say: "Twitter has extraordinary potential, but it has not been released, and it can only operate more successfully if it becomes a private company", and officially announced plans to acquire Twitter wholly. In order to persuade shareholders, he decided to add nearly 15 dollars to the closing price of $39.3 on April 1, and completed the acquisition at a high price of $43 billion per share for a total of $43 billion, which is a huge premium of 38%.
But in fact, including Twitter, Yishui's analysis agencies and media are not very convinced, after all, Musk also said in 2018 that he would take $42 billion to privatize Tesla, and the result was that he could not come up with such money in the end, so this time he thought it was "wolves coming" at the beginning. Then Musk said in the live broadcast of the TED speech on the same day, I guarantee that the assets are enough, and also attracted the famous investment bank Morgan Stanley as the financial adviser for the acquisition project, which means that this time it is true, so on the 15th, Twitter implemented the "poison pill" plan. This is a self-help measure for the board of directors of listed companies to deal with in the face of malicious mergers and acquisitions, in order to allow existing shareholders to buy a large number of newly issued shares at a very low price to dilute the acquirer's shares, thereby raising the cost of acquisition, like this time Musk estimates that he will have to pay twice the money, in short, to force him to buy. The reason why it is "toxic" is because once the plan is implemented, both parties involved will sink a lot of money, and even if they win, the control of the company may be transferred because the equity is diluted, which has a kind of arrogance that would rather be broken than a tile. Unexpectedly, just when the global melon netizens were preparing to watch the blood flow, Musk took the $46.5 billion in his hand and went directly to talk about cooperation with the shareholders behind the board.
After all, Twitter is a perennial loss-making company, Musk wants shareholders to take the acquisition proposal seriously, and urges them to put pressure on Twitter's management, and the agreement is signed by good friends. This wave of cleverness directly led to the final negotiations on the 25th, and Twitter agreed to the $44 billion sale plan, saying that the board of directors believed that a considerable cash premium was the best way forward for shareholders after a deliberate and comprehensive assessment. This refreshing energy, what poison pills are not poison pills, once the agreement is reached, it is all void. Overall, the deal has made both parties happy, even Jack Dorsey, the founder who has always rejected others to control Twitter, and said that he fully trusts Musk's plan, after all, taking Twitter back from Wall Street is the right first step, but is it really back?
This may be different from what some friends think, although Musk is the world's richest man at no. 1 in the Forbes list, although his net worth is nearly 100 billion US dollars higher than the second-ranked president of LVMH, looking rich, but it really does not mean that he can dispose of this money at will. Including this acquisition, it is clear that Musk ate the entire Twitter, in fact, he first formed three companies called "X Holdings", which can be seen as Musk's version of Meta, and when it came to financing, most of them were still pulled from Wall Street banks. Of the 46.5 billion yuan of the acquisition plan mentioned earlier, 13 billion yuan is debt financing, that is, directly asking the bank to borrow money, and 12.5 billion is a margin loan, that is, a mortgage loan with Tesla shares, and the borrowers include Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, Citi and a series of financial institutions. The other $21 billion in equity financing, which is financed by shares of "X Holdings", basically comes from external financial groups such as private equity funds. That is to say, although Twitter was privatized by Musk, Musk and his holding company itself have long been in the shape of Wall Street.
It's not that he doesn't want to pay more, but after selling billions of dollars worth of Tesla stock, Tesla's stock price fell sharply, and he really didn't dare to continue selling. As for Musk's status as the world's richest man, it is also due to his Tesla stock, from the general trend, each share soared from $100 at the beginning of 20 years to $1,000 at the beginning of this year, a 10-fold increase in two years. On the one hand, it is because of Musk's marketing and Tesla's joining the S&P 500 as a huge stimulus to the market. On the other hand, it is mainly because a developed country is crazy to release water, ah no, quantitative easing! Let the capital pour into the securities market, and new energy is not so deeply anchored with the US dollar, which will naturally become the fragrant food of capital. Of course, if we have to say that it has nothing to do with Eagle Sauce, then we can also look at the asset growth trend of the world's richest people in addition to this factor, and it is estimated that it can only be explained that in the two years of the global ravages of the new crown virus, the world economy has made a big leap forward in stability.
But interestingly, in addition to Musk, these billionaires also have a commonality, that is, as long as the family is big, they will inevitably invest in a vote of media. For example, Amazon's Bezos bought the Washington Post for 250 million yuan in 2013, and The President of LVM, Arnault, in 1993 and 2007, successively pocketed two important French financial newspapers, "Tribune" and "Echo". Veteran investors like Buffett directly bought more than 30 newspaper outlets plus a TV station by 2018. Bill Gates was even worse, until last year's divorce was revealed, he through the Gates Foundation, a total of 319 million US dollars to hundreds of media including the BBC, the Guardian, Der Spiegel and other media to write advertorials for his project to build his own image and avoid negative public opinion. The difference is Zuckerberg, who has little need to buy newspapers and TV stations, after all, Facebook is his biggest media platform. Therefore, their purpose of controlling these media organizations is obvious, with their own main battlefield of public opinion, these media can act as goalkeepers for billionaires, excuse the interests of enterprises and personal wealth, reasonable and legal, after all, the old saying is good "take people short, eat people soft".
Don't look at Musk has a family property of 253.6 billion US dollars, but as mentioned earlier, this is mainly based on Tesla's unique rise to speculation, but where the public opinion is a little turbulent, his net worth will have to follow the storm. And Musk himself said that Tesla has been shorted many times by targeted snipers in the past and suffered a lot of losses. There is no longer a media organization to fight a public opinion war, how can it be done? So back in 2017, he tweeted that he wanted to buy Twitter. The reason why I chose to shoot now is that although Twitter is one of the world's largest social platforms, its revenue has continued to decline in the past two years, and its user share is dwarfed by Facebook and Tik tok, and it is easy to break through the psychological defense line of Twitter shareholders at this time. If you really want to carry out the acquisition plan at a time when Twitter had better revenue a few years ago, Musk may not be so easy to get it as smoothly as it is now.
As for the banner of free speech that Musk has been carrying, it is estimated that he himself does not believe it, and he is not unaware that his habit of deleting negative news comments about Tesla has long been spread in and out of the Pacific Ocean, and when several times criticize Twitter for not speaking freely, there will be netizens who will take this to scare him. After all, Tesla is his life, and the money to buy Twitter is also a mortgage made by Tesla, and this stock price can not fall. And it is not Twitter itself that determines freedom of speech, but at the level of so-called free markets and politics in the United States. As long as Huawei is still banned in the United States, as long as the Chinese media is still labeled with special labels, and as long as Chinese IP can be arbitrarily banned, the billionaire's "beautiful vision" of buying Twitter to return the freedom of expression of civilians is just an impossible ideal, because in the end, such "freedom" is still controlled by Wall Street commercial companies.
On the other hand, if absolute freedom of speech is truly enforced, what if hate speech spreads indiscriminately? The European Union has said that if Twitter allows such information to spread, it may face huge fines, and even the software will be directly banned by the EU. So free speech is estimated to mean that look, what he can really do may be what he said on the day of the agreement, what to add editable functions to tweets, what to crack down on bot accounts, and the implementation of the speculative real-name system?
Back to Musk himself, he has a good reputation at home and abroad, and there is no shortage of people with: "Musk! You are my God! The voice, not exaggerated at all, must be more fierce than this. After all, as early as 95 years ago, Musk gave up the opportunity to go to Stanford to participate in the Internet boom, set up Zip2 as a paper network yellow pages and map navigation service such as the New York Times, and sold the company 4 years later, earning $22 million at the age of 28. He then took the money and immediately started a more fledgling online financial payment company X.com, which was later merged into PayPal, and two years later eBay bought it, and Musk made more than $100 million as the largest shareholder.
Then, directly using this money, space exploration technology company SpaceX was established in June 2002 to achieve the plan to colonize Mars, and in 2004, it invested and controlled Tesla, walking in the forefront of "green environmental protection". It can be said that Musk knows how to seize opportunities, but also knows how to find money, and can also insist on achieving ideals, not to blow or black he is a very good entrepreneur, but it is undeniable that he also has ambitions beyond ordinary entrepreneurs. Not only those "landing" projects, at the end of April, SpaceX also launched rockets to send 53 Starlink satellites into the sky. Up to now, SpaceX has launched a total of 2,439 "Starchain" satellites, and eventually built the largest low-Earth orbit satellite constellation of nearly 42,000 satellites, covering the entire Earth. The crowded orbital space and the increased probability of satellite collisions are not to be said, do you think that Starlink is just a space router? That is too underestimated Musk, its communication transmission, satellite imaging, remote sensing detection functions can be directly translated to the U.S. combat forces, from its birth is dual-use, even if it fails, it can occupy the orbit and compress the space of other countries' space exploration.
In addition, Musk also owns high-tech industries such as Brain-computer Interface Company Neuralink, photovoltaic power company SolarCity, and Hyperloop Company Boring Company. Now with the addition of Twitter, he really has complete control over energy, aerospace, public opinion field, communication technology, artificial intelligence, transportation, this large number of systematic industries, is it really not suspected of monopoly? You know, as the base camp of capitalism, the Anti-Monopoly Mechanism in the United States has been ahead of the world for many years, and it can directly break a large company into several pieces at any time. Musk's deal with Twitter also needs to be reviewed and approved by the Federal Trade Commission, the Antitrust Office and other agencies. However, as far as the news released so far, it seems that there is really a discussion on this matter, Musk and the new money behind him seem to have done a lot of manipulation on the "corporate competition" and "whether there is a risk to consumers", and some antitrust former officials said that regulators are unlikely to prevent Musk from acquiring Twitter.
If it really comes to that day, such a company monopolizes people's lives in some field, brain-computer interface, web3.0, earth-sky communication, these things add up to too cyberpunk, large companies control everything in people's social life, even if Musk may not have such a purpose, the capital consortium behind it is definitely looking forward to such a future. However, it is still too early to say that these are actually too early, and the actual development will not be so extreme, after all, the capital consortium can help him do this thing must also go for the interests, usually before achieving this step, they have to part ways because of interests.
And Musk's financial resources are actually not to that step, after reaching a deal with Twitter, the brother also said that the next step is to buy Coca-Cola, and then add cocaine back. As soon as this statement came out, the investment community was stunned, and they all said that they would not muddy the waters, and Tesla's stock price fell in response, and Musk hurriedly said that this was just his own mouth. Although the wealth of the world's richest man is indeed extraordinary, but since he can spend a huge amount of money to buy Twitter, of course, he also has the ability to let the new leeks help him pay off his debts. But even so, compared with Coca-Cola, the old capitalist monster, he may have choked on his pants. [Coca-Cola's market value is $273.4 billion].
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