"Brothers, Twitter is ours!" Musk's tweet has become the hottest topic in the world today, and there is no one.
On Monday, local time, Twitter announced that the company's board of directors has accepted billionaire Musk's $44 billion (288.6 billion yuan) acquisition and privatization proposal. Musk bought the company for $54.20 per share, the same price he made earlier this month in his initial offer. The deal is expected to close in 2022, and upon completion of the deal, Twitter will become a privately held company.
Although Musk has previously expressed the idea of privatizing Twitter, and netizens believe that Musk has such financial resources, many people still think it is a dream at the moment when the transaction is really decided. In their view, the world's most influential social media has become Musk's private "back garden", which is incredibly magical.
From the beginning of the stake to the completion of the full acquisition, Musk only took three months. What did Musk do behind these three months of stories? From the perspective of the outside world, especially for overseas developers, can the new Twitter bring us more changes worth looking forward to?
Three months after acquiring Twitter, what did Musk do?
At the end of January this year, Musk began to buy Twitter stock and quietly increased his holdings. Subsequently, Twitter released its full-year 2021 earnings report in February, where the net loss narrowed somewhat but still reached $221 million, in addition, the total number of ad engagements in the fourth quarter of last year fell by 12% year-on-year. At the time of the closing of the transaction on March 14, Musk bought nearly 73.5 million shares in total, and in about two months, he became Twitter's largest shareholder, holding 9.2% of the shares.
At this time, Musk also took advantage of the situation to start a public opinion war. On March 25, for example, he posted a poll asking fans if they thought Twitter adhered to the "Free Speech" principle, and more than 2 million users voted, 70% of whom said Twitter was not qualified at this point.
On March 26, Musk tweeted another question, "Do you need a new social platform?" The tweet makes people think.
In April, Musk announced the acquisition of a 9.2% stake in Twitter for $2.89 billion, which exceeded the shareholding ratio of all individual and institutional shareholders at that time, and was the largest shareholder of Twitter. But after refusing to join Twitter's board, people realized that Musk was going to buy Twitter (the condition for joining the board was that Musk agreed not to hold more than 15% of the shares and would not buy the company).
In a letter to Twitter, Musk wrote: "Since I made my investment, I have realized that the company will neither thrive nor serve the needs of society well in its current form unless it is transformed into a private company." ”
Musk's tweeting campaign has since continued, including questioning "Twitter is dying"; reducing the price of subscription service Twitter Blue from $2.99 a month to $2 and allowing payments with Dogecoin; don't rely on advertising to make money; renaming Twitter to Tit; and even transforming the company's headquarters into a shelter for the homeless.
Musk said he would bid $43 billion to buy Twitter, taking twitter private. He even warned Twitter that he could sell his stake if the acquisition was rejected. If this development continues, Twitter's stock price is likely to usher in a large-scale decline.
Twitter also resisted. On April 15, Twitter urgently passed the "Term Shareholder Rights Program," also known as the Poison Pill Defense Strategy, to fend off Musk's $43 billion hostile takeover plan.
Put simply, if any individual or group acquires at least 15% beneficial ownership of Twitter's issued shares without the approval of Twitter's board of directors, the "Poison Pill Defense Strategy" would allow existing shareholders to purchase the rights to purchase additional shares at a discounted price, effectively diluting the ownership interests of the adversaries.
According to Bloomberg, people familiar with the matter revealed that Twitter hopes to buy the company a little more time to consider through this plan, and Twitter's board of directors has not completely ruled out the possibility of accepting the acquisition.
Notably, Twitter's shareholding structure is rather delicate — the total holdings of the 11 members of the board of directors are less than 2.5%, and Musk not only leads with a 9.2% stake, but also quickly comes up with $46.5 billion in financing credentials, including Morgan Stanley, which will provide $13 billion in loans, $12.5 billion in Tesla equity collateral and $21 billion in cash.
This reveals two pieces of information, 1. Musk is not short of money; 2. Morgan Stanley, as the third largest shareholder, also stands with me.
Musk added that he would not bargain back and forth, which is the highest and final offer he can make.
Of course, as outsiders, we can't judge what kind of discussion and game is done within Twitter, but Musk's inevitable move is indeed tempting. As many have teased Tencent about acquiring and investing in more than 100 game companies in 2021, "he's giving too much." ”
Variables that may occur after a wholly owned acquisition
Musk's acquisition of Twitter will inevitably trigger the close attention of developers who go abroad. As an important social media platform, Twitter has always been one of the battlefields of advertising and marketing. As Musk personally, his every move is also controlling the flow of traffic. A more representative event is that Musk's Twitter has been paired with two-dimensional game charts (such as the original god) many times, and once even boosted the stock price of Bandai Namco.
Enjoy believes that after Musk acquires Twitter, to a certain extent, it will apply games, meta-universes and blockchain concepts and technologies to Twitter's operations, and be fully prepared to improve the competitive barriers of Twitter as a social platform.
Since entering in 2009, Musk has been a veteran twitter user for more than ten years, with a total of more than 17,300 tweets, an average of more than 120,000 likes, and more than 81 million fans, making him the largest V besides entertainment stars.
Musk is also an avid fan of virtual currencies. In March, Musk claimed to own Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin and had no intention of selling them. This sentence instantly splashed in the currency circle, and the price of the three virtual coins rose sharply.
Relying on a strong personal influence, some veterans of the blockchain industry believe that Musk, who is proficient in blockchain, cryptocurrency and other technologies, is likely to apply this cutting-edge operational thinking to Twitter's operations.
In addition, the changes that Musk may bring to Twitter are also to broaden the inclusiveness of Twitter and improve social capabilities to keep pace with google, meta, and TikTok.
The more accepted view is that Twitter's development in recent years has fallen behind, the financial report loss is a symptom, its internal reasons are mainly focused on the unstable function update, poor user reputation, advertising business model is not novel enough, etc. Since TikTok expanded overseas for four years and won the MAU to break 1 billion, Twitter even if it has the heart of direct competition, it can not come up with too strong a way to deal with it.
Speaking about the future development of Twitter, Musk said that "freedom of speech is the cornerstone of the operation of democratic institutions, and Twitter is a civic square in the digital age, which is crucial for the discussion of the future of mankind." Based on this, Musk will also invest energy in improving new product features, opening up platform algorithms to enhance trust, combating fake trolls, verifying all human users, etc., and improving user-level reputation.
From the perspective of market competition, if Twitter can complete the reform, it may further stimulate the iterative upgrading of other social platforms, avoid the monopoly phenomenon of one or several monopolies, promote the acquisition of high-quality traffic on each platform, and provide better conditions for overseas advertisers. Whether it is a game going to sea or an application tool going to sea, the number of developers benefiting will be more and more.
epilogue
2022 may be a key year for Twitter to seek a breakthrough.
In the former, after Facebook changed its name to Meta the year before, Zuckerberg clarified the strategic direction of the metaverse; after that, TikTok's upward momentum is fierce, according to the Guardian, TikTok may surpass Twitter and Snapchat's global advertising scale combined this year, and global advertising revenue is expected to triple this year to reach $11.6 billion, more than Snapchat and Twitter combined at $10.44 billion.
Where is Twitter's breakthrough? Before Musk announced the acquisition, that seemed like a difficult problem. And after today, we seem to see a little idea of solving the problem.
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