Is Musk bailing out of the billion-dollar deal to acquire Twitter, especially after Twitter’s board unanimously recommended the $44 billion acquisition to its shareholders? Or is this yet another part of the saga that has stretched over the past few months?
According to The Washington Post, the deal to acquire the popular micro-blogging site seems to be in peril as it seems that Musk is still looking to find a way out from the deal – a deal which he initiated in April and the funding efforts for which are backed by names such as Larry Ellison, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, crypto exchange Binance, and the state investment firm of Qatar.
The Post cited three anonymous sources who informed that Musk’s people were no longer engaging in certain discussions regarding funding the deal and that a “change in direction from Musk’s team” might be on the cards.
If Musk does bail out on the deal, then he will have to pay Twitter a termination fee of $1 billion. The terms of the original agreement between the two inform that if a party terminates the merger agreement under “specified limited circumstances,” then they are liable to pay the termination fee to the other.
It remains to be seen whether this latest development in the Musk-Twitter saga fulfils the circumstances or not, and whether the richest man in the world does not manage to find a legal loophole and charm his way out of shelling out $1 billion.
“The Twitter soap opera is clearly coming to some sort of finale over the coming months as Musk makes the decision to stay (with a lower price) or go,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors. “The Twitter deal has clearly caused chaos at Twitter.”
A majority of Musk’s recent shenanigans regarding the buyout of Twitter has been the presence of fake and spam accounts on the platform. He has, in recent times, claimed that there are far more fake and spam accounts on Twitter than the company leads everyone to believe and expressed misgivings regarding how Twitter dealt with bots.
Twitter refuted his claim by saying that less than 5% of accounts on its platform were bot accounts. Many speculated that Musk was using bots as a reason to acquire Twitter at a lower price, and Musk did not help matters by saying that it was not entirely out of the question.
Speaking of bots, Twitter informed on Thursday that it has removed over a million spam accounts from its platform on a daily basis and has the situation at hand. This number is much more than the 5% stated by Twitter and CEO Parag Agarwal (in May). The company is said to have already provided Musk with a trove of data and shared information with Musk’s team in order to “consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.”
