After much anticipation, Twitter’s board of directors unanimously approved Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout offer. The buyout deal, expected to close sometime this year, would take Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) private at $54.20 per share.
In the SEC filing Tuesday, the Twitter board unanimously determined that the merger agreement is advisable and the merger and the other transactions contemplated by the merger agreement are fair to, advisable, and in the best interests of Twitter and its stockholders; and they adopted and approved the merger.
The regulatory filing comes days after Musk held a virtual town hall event with Twitter employees where he reiterated his intentions to follow through with the deal and his desire to allow all legal speech on Twitter, even when that includes so-called “lawful but awful” content.
Musk emphasized that he aspires to make Twitter an appealing system to use that is as inclusive as possible.
“Ideally, I’d like to get like 80% of North America, and perhaps, I don’t know, half the world or something ultimately on Twitter in one form or another,” Musk explained. “And that means it must be something that is appealing to people. It obviously cannot be a place where people feel uncomfortable or harassed, or they’ll simply not use it.”
He added that his focus at Twitter would be on driving the product and technology, similar to his roles at Tesla and SpaceX.
“Whether I’m called the CEO or something else is much less important than my ability to drive the product in the right direction.”
In an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, Musk said that “a few unresolved matters” related to the deal remain, reiterating his concern about bots.
Last month, Musk said he was putting the deal “on hold” unless Twitter offered definitive proof that less than 5% of its daily users are spam and bot accounts, The Dallas Express reported.
Musk claimed that the company breached its obligations under the merger agreement by “actively resisting and thwarting” his right to information on the spam and bot account data.
He estimated that as much as 20% of Twitter’s 229 million users are spambots – four times the figure touted by the company.
Shares of Twitter, which are down nearly 10% year-to-date, are trading at $38.68 as of the time of publication, well below Musk’s offer.
