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Elon Musk is the new owner of Twitter, giving the Tesla billionaire control of one of the world’s most powerful megaphones.
Late Thursday evening, Musk tweeted: « The bird is freed. »
Multiple news outlets reported late Thursday that, after months of legal wrangling and public acrimony, Musk had closed the $44 billion deal and fired top executives including the company’s CEO Parag Agrawal.
Twitter chairman Bret Taylor removed that title from his Twitter bio.
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On Wednesday, Musk changed his Twitter bio to « Chief Twit » shortly before walking into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a porcelain sink. « Let that sink in, » he tweeted.
With the deal completed, Twitter is once again a private company. Its shares stopped trading nearly nine years after it went public under the symbol TWTR on the New York Stock Exchange.
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Musk agreed to buy Twitter in April and take it private before trying to get out of the deal, claiming Twitter misrepresented the number of spam and fake accounts on its platform, which Twitter denied.
Twitter sued Musk to complete the purchase. Earlier this month, Musk offered to buy Twitter at the original price of $54.20 a share. A Delaware Court of Chancery judge delayed the trial that had been set for Oct. 17 to give the two sides more time to reach a deal.Did Elon Musk overpay for Twitter?
Musk has acknowledged he overpaid for Twitter.
« The $44 billion price tag for Twitter will go down as one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in the history of M&A deals on the Street in our opinion, » Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives wrote in a research note Thursday. He put the value of Twitter at closer to $25 billion.
« Although obviously myself and other investors are overpaying for Twitter right now, » Musk recently said, « the long-term potential for Twitter is an order of magnitude higher than its current value. »Why did Musk buy Twitter?
On a Tesla earnings call earlier this month, Musk said he was “excited about the Twitter situation.” He described Twitter as a platform with “incredible potential” that had “languished for a long time.
