Elon Musk Reaches Deal to Buy Twitter for $44 Billion

etonline.com:

Elon Musk in a deal that values the company at $44 billion, the board announced Monday afternoon.«The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter's stockholders,» Bret Taylor, the company's independent board chair, said in a statement.Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, reiterated his plans to remake Twitter as a forum dedicated to promoting free speech.«Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,» he said in a statement.Musk also said he plans on «making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans» on the platform.It's the largest deal to take a company private in at least two decades, reported.The board voted unanimously in favor of the acquisition.

The deal is expected to close this year, subject to the approval of Twitter's shareholders.The official acquisition caps off a drama worth of a soap opera between the famously mercurial Musk and one of the world's most prominent social networks.The billionaire disclosed earlier this month that he had become Twitter's largest shareholder, and soon after proposed to buy the company outright and take it private.

Twitter's board initially resisted the offer, adopting an anti-takeover measure known as a poison pill.But the board decided to negotiate after Musk updated his proposal to show he had secured financing and after no other suitors came forward, according to media reports.«It all came down to no other bidders or white knights emerging in the M&A process,» Daniel Ives, a Wedbush analyst who follows Twitter, said in a note.