How did Musk acquire Twitter?

NB:This may not be a word-for-word transcript.

How the World’s Richest Person Bought Twitter

Twitter’s board has decided to sell the company, accepting Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s offer of $54.20 per share in cash, which values the company at around $44 billion. Shares of Twitter added to recent gains and jumped more than 5% on Monday after the social media company formally accepted the buyout offer.

The transaction was unanimously approved by Twitter’s board of directors, with the deal expected to close later in 2022 pending shareholder approval.

Twitter was until recently expected to decline Musk’s offer to buy the company, but the board appeared to be more receptive to Musk’s acquisition offer in recent days, especially after the Tesla billionaire revealed in an SEC filing last week that he had secured $46.5 billion in financing.

Musk has secured $25.5 billion of fully committed debt and margin loan financing for the deal, and is providing an approximately $21 billion equity commitment, according to a press release.

Earlier this year, Musk became the richest person in the world, unseating Jeff Bezos who held that title for four years prior.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief is worth $268.2 billion. That’s over $96 billion more than Bezos, ranked 2nd on the list. Even after selling billions of dollars in Tesla stock late last year and owing taxes on the gains from those sales, Musk is estimated to be $117.2 billion richer than on March 18, 2021, when Forbes finalized last year’s billionaires list.

Musk’s first time on the list was 10 years ago, with a net worth of $2 billion. But in the last 2 years, his net worth really took off. Musk owes his status as the world’s richest person mostly to Tesla’s soaring and volatile stock price. The volatility can be partially attributed to Musk’s erratic reputation on Twitter. For instance, when he challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin to single combat after SpaceX started sending telecom gear to Ukraine.

Tesla’s stock has been criticized by some analysts and investors and Musk himself for being priced too high. But shares have continued to climb, gaining another 35 percent in the last year. This happened despite widespread automotive chip shortages, stricter regulations of Chinese user data that the company uses for its self-driving systems, and the recall of hundreds of thousands of Teslas in 2021.

Musk owns about 21 percent of the company, but has pledged more than half his stake as collateral for loans. Wall Street analysts were largely split when Musk first went public with his unsolicited offer to buy Twitter earlier this month. Some experts predicted that the soap opera would end with Musk acquiring the company, while others remained highly skeptical and downgraded Twitter’s stock amid the uncertainty. The vast majority of analysts maintain a hold rating on Twitter shares as the market waits to see what happens with Musk’s potential takeover.