Elon Musk has now backtracked and said he will actually buy Twitter after all at $54.20 a share. This offer has been confirmed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the SEC filing, Musk says he will “proceed to closing of the transaction” on the terms he negotiated with Twitter in April, on condition that the social media company closes the lawsuit it brought against him.
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“We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC,” Twitter’s investor relations account said — where else? — on Twitter. “The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share.”
The billionaire and Twitter have been battling for months now about the Twitter takeover. After offering to buy the company, Musk tried to cancel the deal, claiming that Twitter had lied about the number of bot accounts on the platform. Twitter in turn sued Musk in order to get him to abide by the contract he negotiated, and a trial date has been set for October 17th.
Last week, an embarrassing tranche of text messages was released in court filings. The messages were notable for what wasn’t in them: any discussion of concerns about bots. Instead, what seemed to have caused Musk to lose interest was a conflict with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who had asked Musk to stop tweeting negative things about Twitter.
Also, at a pretrial hearing last week, Musk’s argument about being given bad data by Twitter suffered a blow. He’d hired some companies to do analysis on Twitter’s bot numbers. One company confirmed Twitter’s numbers; the other suggested that 11 percent of Twitter users were inauthentic… but that analysis wasn’t statistically strong.
