Bio-Rad Laboratories is in talks to combine with fellow life-sciences company Qiagen NV in a deal that would be worth more than $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The talks have been going on for a while but any agreement isn’t likely for another few weeks or more—and there may not be one.
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.
Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk now plans to close his proposed $44 billion deal for Twitter Inc., according to a Tuesday filing that arrived less than two weeks before a judge was scheduled to hear a case on the disputed acquisition.
Musk’s lawyers sent a letter to Twitter’s management team indicating that he was proposing to move forward with the original acquisition terms late Monday, and that letter was released as a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday afternoon. A Twitter spokesperson later confirmed to MarketWatch that the company intended to proceed with the deal for $54.20 a share.
Twitter
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shares jumped 22.2% to $52 in Tuesday’s session, after an hours-long trading halt that started after Bloomberg News first reported the move around noon Eastern time, suggesting a possible end to the legal saga between the two parties. The increase is the second best daily percentage gain on record for Twitter stock, behind only the 27.1% gain experienced when Musk disclosed his initial ownership stake in Twitter in April. Twitter was the best performing stock Tuesday in the S&P 500 index
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and is now up 20.3% on the year.
The two sides have been locked in a legal battle for months, and a Delaware Chancery Court judge was expected to hear from both sides in a five-day trial slated to begin Oct. 17. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the Delaware judge asked the two sides to come up with a plan by the end of the day that could bring about an end to the litigation.
“Musk could see the writing on the wall that he was going to lose the trial,” said Josh White, an assistant finance professor at Vanderbilt University, in an email to MarketWatch. “By doing this, he can save legal costs, time and ultimately losing in a very public trial.”
See also: Here’s how Twitter’s users reacted to Musk agreeing to buy the platform
Musk agreed in April to buy Twitter in a deal that valued the company at roughly $44 billion, but he later said that he was terminating the deal. The Tesla
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CEO cited concerns about bot activity on Twitter and said he believed the company’s management team wasn’t accurate in its public disclosures about the extent of spam activity on the platform.
White noted that text messages released in conjunction with the case showed that Musk was aware of Twitter’s bot issue before going forward with his original deal offer, and he doubted that Musk would be able to show that “something really changed” after that point.
“If he offered less than $54.20, Twitter might have proceeded with the trial, and he would be deposed,” White continued. “By offering the original price, he maximizes the chance that Twitter accepts and the trial ends. I expect Twitter’s board to accept the deal and for it to close rather quickly.”
Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives agreed that the Tesla leader’s latest move marked a “clear sign that Musk recognized heading into Delaware Court that the chances of winning vs. Twitter board was highly unlikely and this $44 billion deal was going to be completed one way or another,” he wrote in a note to clients. “Being forced to do the deal after a long and ugly court battle in Delaware was not an ideal scenario and instead accepting this path and moving forward with the deal will save a massive legal headache.”
Opinion: Twitter stood up to Elon Musk and won, but will it feel like a win once he owns it?
Vanderbilt’s White noted that a deal at the original price would be a “big” win for Twitter shareholders.
“The stock price of Snap
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and Twitter seemed to trade around the same price level before the offer,” he told MarketWatch. “Snap is now a ~$10 stock with a $17 billion market cap. So Twitter’s shareholders win by getting $54.20 rather than having the price drop to $10-20 per share.”
Additionally, he deemed Delaware business law another winner: “This deal shows that even the richest man in the world cannot overcome well-written contracts enforced in a neutral and fair way by the Delaware courts.”
Online secondhand-fashion marketplace Poshmark Inc. has agreed to be bought by South Korean internet company Naver in a $1.2 billion deal, the companies announced Monday, a move that executives said would help both brands expand internationally.
Shares of Poshmark
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jumped 11.8% in after-hours trading on the news.
Under the terms of the deal, Naver
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will acquire Poshmark’s outstanding shares for $17.90 in cash, representing a 15% upside to Poshmark’s Monday closing price of $15.57. The transaction is set to close by the first quarter of next year, pending Poshmark shareholders’ approval.
Poshmark went public in late 2020, pricing shares at $42 a share, and ended its first day of trading at more than $100 a share, but has never approached those heights again. It last traded for more than the acquisition price Naver has agreed to pay late last year.
For more: Five things to know about Poshmark
In a statement, executives from both companies talked up the potential to combine Naver’s array of search, e-commerce, AI and social-media technology with Poshmark’s social and shopping platforms. Poshmark, the companies said, would also embark on a bigger international expansion strategy, including into other markets in Asia, in the “medium-term.”
They also talked about the potential for the combined company to save around $30 million annually within two years after the deal’s closing through “rationalization of public company costs” and higher operating leverage, along with the potential for more than 20% yearly sales growth by harnessing Naver’s advertising resources.
Naver, which runs large search and e-commerce platforms, said the move would broaden its e-commerce platform, bring younger users into the company’s fold and allow it to “capitalize on the global online fashion re-commerce and sustainable economy opportunity.”
“Naver’s leading technology in search, AI recommendation and e-commerce tools will help power the next phase of Poshmark’s global growth,” Choi Soo-Yeon, Naver’s chief executive, said in a statement, which also said that Naver hosted a large number of digital content creators in Korea.
Naver owns companies like Wattpad, a social-media platform, and runs Webtoon, a site for digital comics, along with a metaverse platform called Zepeto, and also has joint ownership of an internet service group in Japan. Naver said its online community in Korea consists of more than 36 million monthly users, who use its search engine and other services.
Poshmark Chief Executive Manish Chandra said the deal would also give Poshmark opportunities to grow.
“Longer term, as part of Naver, we will benefit from their financial resources, significant technology capabilities, and leading presence across Asia to expand our platform, elevate our product and user experiences, and enter new and large markets,” he said in the statement.
Naver said the acquisition would also help give it a bigger foothold in the U.S. And it said the deal would allow it to broaden the appeal of so-called live-stream shopping.
“Live-stream shopping is a key driver of e-commerce in China and Korea (and increasingly in the U.S.) today, allowing shoppers to buy products in real-time through live video broadcasts, enabling greater insights and more clarity around purchasing decisions,” the statement said.
Once the deal closes, Poshmark will be a standalone subsidiary of Naver, with the same management team, brand and headquarters in Redwood City, Calif., the companies revealed.
At the close of Monday’s trading, shares of Poshmark were down around 9% year-to-date. The S&P 500 index
SPX,
by comparison, has slid 23% over that time.