Elon Musk made headlines again earlier this week by renewing his offer to buy Twitter at $54.20 per share. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX reiterated his offer already made a few months ago in a letter addressed to the American authorities. This is the latest twist in the saga involving the eccentric outspoken billionaire and the Twitter platform.
Still, Elon Musk has attached different conditions to his offer: he must first obtain debt financing for the operation to succeed. At the same time, the contractor demands that Twitter drop all legal proceedings brought against it.
“The company’s intention is to complete the transaction at $54.20 per share,” a Twitter spokesperson confirmed when interviewed by ZDNet. For Elon Musk, this operation should ultimately strengthen the creation of X, an “all-terrain” application project that he has been carrying for a long time. “The purchase of Twitter will be an accelerator for the creation of X, the universal application,” he said on Twitter. He had already launched the idea of an X application to the ecosystem as broad as WeChat, which extends from social media to chat, passing through video games and payments.
A “super app”
Last May, in the All-In podcast, the entrepreneur had already affirmed his ambition to provide the American market with a “superapplication”. “It’s either converting Twitter into this or creating something new. It has to happen one way or another, ”he explained then. “If you’re in China, you kind of live on WeChat,” the leader said, calling the Chinese app a merger of “Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of stuff rolled into one, with a great interface. “.
The superapp, he continued, should serve as a “digital public square” for users to leave comments and post videos. Once the platform has a high level of trust among the public, “then payments, whether it’s crypto or fiat, can make a lot of sense.”
At a public meeting with Twitter employees a month later, Elon Musk reiterated that idea. In China, “we essentially live on WeChat because it is so practical and useful in daily life,” he insisted. “If we can achieve that goal, or even come close to it at Twitter, that would be a huge success. He also suggested that Twitter’s user base could grow from just over 200 million to “at least a billion people,” CNN reports.
As a reminder, Elon Musk co-founded an online bank called X.com in 1999, which later merged with another company to form PayPal. In 2017, he bought the X.com domain name from PayPal for an undisclosed sum. In the meantime, the entrepreneur founded SpaceX in 2002 and, through his car company, Tesla, released the Model X in 2015. To continue his Twitter offering, Elon Musk created three holding companies in Delaware , all bearing variations of the “X Holdings” name.
The end of a saga?
Twitter has been in turmoil since April, when Elon Musk first announced his intention to buy the platform. The latter had raised $46.5 billion in funding to back its unsolicited bid, relying on loans and $33.5 billion from its own capital. As the deal materialized, some of Twitter’s top executives were pushed out of the company and others resigned.
Everything fell apart when the businessman suspended the operation, complaining about the number of fake accounts on the Twitter platform. Then, in July, Elon Musk announced he was pulling out of the deal. Twitter’s board quickly responded that it was prepared to take legal action to secure the deal at a price of $54.20 per share. As promised, Twitter has filed a complaint against the CEO of Tesla.
Source: ZDNet.com