Technology
PUBLISHED
1
In a reversal sharp enough to induce whiplash, Elon Musk has agreed to pay the full amount of $54.20 per share for the purchase of Twitter, fulfilling the offer he made prior to trying to exit the deal.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.The purchase was revealed in a letter to Twitter after the two have been engrossed in an ongoing legal battle of contractual obligations versus an apparent “bot” problem on the social media platform.
Musk was in the process of trying to back out of the deal on the back of Twitter’s failure to accurately disclose an alleged high number of non-human accounts on the platform, while Twitter was countersuing the billionaire to force the sale through.
"None of these analyses so far as we can tell remotely supported what Mr. Musk told Twitter and told the world," Twitter lawyer Bradley Wilson told the court, Reuters reports.
Experts believed Twitter was likely to win the court battle, which was set for just two weeks from now, and this may explain why Musk has now agreed to the price originally set in April of this year. At the time, the valuation was significantly higher than the trading stock price of Twitter, but the news has spurred an astronomical rise of 22 percent just today.
Twitter will now likely fall into the hands of the Tesla and SpaceX owner, who plans on converting it into a platform for “free speech” and remove the high number of bot accounts, according to previous tweets.
