Elon Musk sent a letter to Twitter
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indicating he intends to move forward with his original proposal that he acquire the company for $54.20 a share, according to a filing from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Tesla Inc.
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CEO agreed to buy the social media company back in April for $44 billion, but in recent months said he wanted to terminate the deal, publicly citing concerns about bots on the platform. The two sides had been entrenched in a legal battle over the past few months, and a Delaware Chancery Court judge was scheduled to hear arguments on the case in October, a case Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives said Musk was “highly unlikely” to win.
Twitter users reacted to the news on Tuesday afternoon, many of them joking about a potential resolution to the seemingly never-ending Elon Musk Twitter saga.
One Twitter user said she believes Musk will look to reinstate the account of former President Donald Trump, which was banned shortly after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump has claimed he won’t return to Twitter even if the Musk deal is executed, and he’ll continue to post on his platform, Truth Social.
See also: Trump’s Facebook ban may end as soon as January 2023, Meta executive says
“We’re doing a big platform right now, so I probably wouldn’t have any interest,” the former president said.
Another user tweeted that supporters of the meme crypto dogecoin
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are excited by Musk’s move to proceed with the deal. Musk has touted dogecoin on several occasions in the past few years.
Similar to bitcoin, dogecoin is a peer-to-peer, open-source cryptocurrency. It trades under the ticker symbol “DOGE” and features the face of the shiba inu from the popular Doge meme as its logo. Dogecoin was up as much as 9.16% after the Bloomberg news was published.
Musk has not publicly commented on the report, but one Twitter user pointed out that he tweeted about his satellite internet project Starlink after the news broke, but did not mention Twitter in any way.
A report from The Wall Street Journal stated Musk’s legal team relayed the proposal to Twitter’s team “overnight Monday.”
Shares of Tesla Inc. dipped after the news, and are now up just 1.31% during Tuesday’s trading. Shares of the EV maker were up as much as 5.65% on the day before the Musk news.
The news comes a few days after hundreds of text messages from Musk’s phone were made public as evidence in Twitter’s lawsuit.
