According to those familiar with the matter, several private-equity firms have expressed interest in participating in a deal for Twitter, offering ways to challenge Musk’s offer.
Tesla Inc (NYSE: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has recently shown his desire to buy Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR), offering to acquire all the shares of the company in a deal that would value Twitter at about $41 billion. Now, Musk is willing to invest between $10 billion and $15 billion of his own money in Twitter to take it private and launch a tender offer in about 10 days. He has already tapped Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) to raise another $10 billion in debt. In addition, Musk is planning to “make significant improvements” to make Twitter an “open source”.
Musk, who is currently Twitter’s second-biggest shareholder with a 9.2% stake, stated:
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”
Last week, Twitter applied a “poison pill” in order to protect itself from Musk’s buyout offer. According to those familiar with the matter, several private-equity firms have expressed interest in participating in a deal for Twitter, offering ways to challenge Musk’s offer. For example, Thoma Bravo, private equity and growth capital firm, contacted Twitter to offer a buyout.
Musk Wants to Make the Algorithm of Twitter Public
Earlier, Musk posted a poll asking if Twitter should be an open-source platform. More than 82 percent of respondents voted for “yes”. As the billionaire stated before, Twitter fails to “adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.”
Twitter algorithm should be open source
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2022
What Elon Musk is calling Twitter for is to be more transparent with its algorithm. Some of Twitter’s technology is already open-source and publicly available. However, according to Musk, the rules that computers follow to determine what you see in your Twitter feed should be public as well. The current algorithm used by Twitter allows finding which tweets you see from people you follow on the platform and showing you tweets from others that Twitter thinks you’d like to see, depending on the accounts you interact with, the popularity of a tweet, and how other people you know are interacting with a tweet.
Notably, since his appearance on Twitter has been facing criticism from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Elon Musk even started considering the launch of his own social media platform.
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