South African-born billionaire Elon Musk is accelerating his efforts to take control of Twitter, lining up a $46.5 billion bounty for his bid.
Reuters reports Musk, the world's richest man, has secured the billions in debt and equity financing to buy the social media company, and is considering taking his offer directly to shareholders.
The news wire service says Musk has committed to put up $33.5 billion, which will include $21 billion of equity and $12.5 billion of margin loans against some of his Tesla shares to finance the transaction.
Earlier this month, the Tesla CEO bought a 9.2% stake in the microblogging platform, making him the second-biggest shareholder of Twitter.
Ten days later, Musk made a cash offer of $43 billion to Twitter's board of directors to take over the company, to which the board didn’t respond.
Thereafter, the billionaire has been tweeting to his 81 million followers about his intentions to take control of the company.
“Taking Twitter private at $54.20 should be up to shareholders, not the board,” he posted on the platform.
The message was followed by another tweet: “If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying! And authenticate all real humans.”
Musk, an advocate of free speech, has also suggested the social media platform’s policies are good “if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy”, signalling policy changes that Twitter may adopt under his stewardship.
Share