Already the first shareholder of the social network, the Fantasque Founder of Tesla and Spacex announced Thursday a takeover bid to acquire Twitter and get it out of the stock market. His motivations question.
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$ 54.20. This is the very serious amount to which ELON Musk proposed to redeem the actions of Twitter … but it is also a nod to cannabis, nicknamed “4/20” in American slang, with reference to the usual of smoking Joints at 4:20 am in the afternoon. As often with the founder of Tesla and Spacex, the entrepreneurial flamboyance rubs shoulders with a potache provocation, with an art consumed of the opposite. The surprise takeover offering, launched Thursday, April 14 by the richest man in the world, plunged the world of business and media – and Twitter – in a moment of excitement to surrealist accents. The hostile capital lever generates all the more conjectures that it entails, in addition to its economic component, an important political dimension.
Twitter “will not prosper or fulfill its societal mission [of freedom of expression] in its current form,” MUSK explained in a letter addressed to the Board of Directors. Before throwing, with his usual flat: “Twitter has a huge potential. I’ll realize it.”
The price offered by ELON MUSK in its takeover bid is valued at $ 46 billion (€ 42.3 billion) the company already has 9% of the capital. The buyer is therefore ready to pay a “premium”, that is to say a bonus of 21% compared to the opening course of Title Thursday, and 54% compared to that of 28 January, date to which he discreetly started investing in Twitter, until becoming his first shareholder. This low noise raid was revealed on April 4 in documents from the US Stock Field Constable. Given, Twitter’s leaders then proposed to the new shareholder to enter the Board of Directors, before the person concerned refuses, on April 11, in a new action. It was probably a tactic to get your hands more legally free.
“I do not play the classic round trip”, preferring “go directly to the goal”, today explains Elon Musk to the board of directors, in his letter announcing his unfriendly opa. In the wake, the social network announced that it would “consider carefully” the offer.
A social network still deficit
Twitter is, more than other social networks, a target achievable, because it is in a much more precarious economic situation than Facebook (2.9 billion users), YouTube (Alphabet-Google Group, 2 Billions of users) or Tiktok (1 billion users). Its turnover represented $ 5 billion in 2021, a share of the online advertising market of about 1%, according to the Insider Intelligence agency. Despite nearly 220 million daily active users, the company has never found a real financial stability, and is still not profitable. Its growth has slowed in recent months , and its economic model, based almost exclusively on advertising, has been affected by the pandemic crisis. In 2021, despite a recovery of 37% of its turnover, the company was still losing $ 221 million.
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