One possibility, the insiders say: a partnership with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, which planned to close in 2018 invest with him when he was considering delisting Tesla.
Silver Lake co-owner Egon Durban is a Twitter board member and led Musk’s deal team during the failed 2018 attempt to privatize Tesla. Silver Lake declined to comment to the New York Post.
Whether Musk would make Twitter an entirely new offer – increasing its current offer – or whether new partners would buy shares themselves is not clear. A Musk spokesperson declined to comment.
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first bid
Musk announced earlier this week that he wants to buy Twitter for about 40 billion euros. He believes that the platform for short messages has a lot of potential, but that this is not yet being realized. He wants to take the company off the stock exchange and offered 54.20 dollars (almost 50 euros) per share.
That would be 54 percent more than the shares were worth on Jan. 28, the last day before the tech billionaire started investing in Twitter.
Previously, he had already bought 9 percent into the company, making him the largest shareholder of Twitter had become.
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Remove from scholarship
“After my investment, I realized that this company will not prosper, nor fulfill its social function in its current form. Twitter must therefore turn into a privately held company,” Musk said in a statement.
“I invested in Twitter because I believe in its potential to be the global platform for free speech. And I believe that freedom of speech is a societal necessity for a functioning democracy,” Musk continued.
Musk is now too sued by an angry shareholder of Twitter. The Tesla CEO did not announce until late that he had an interest in Twitter, which, according to the indictment, has kept the stock price artificially low. Musk bought the shares on March 14, but did not announce it until April 4.
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Need more shares
In order to actually take Twitter off the stock exchange, Elon Musk will have to get hold of enough shares and thus have to entice enough shareholders to sell their shares.
The bare minimum he needs is half the shares. Then he can only determine the policy and also start a process to take the company off the stock exchange. But that takes a long time and is complicated.
If Musk gets at least 90 percent of the shares, he can take the company off the stock exchange via a much faster procedure.
Gifpil
Twitter, however, will not be taken over without a fight. Yesterday a special construction was rigged, a so-called poison pill, which can prevent this.
Current shareholders will have the opportunity to purchase additional shares through a share issue. As a result, Musk’s interest will be diluted. This makes it more difficult for him to take over Twitter.
The construction will only come into effect when his interest in Twitter is 15 percent or more.
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