Twitter’s Board Unanimously Recommends Elon Musk’s $44 Billion Takeover Bid

The board said the proposed takeover is “advisable and in the best interests of Twitter and its stockholders.”

2 min read

Jun 21, 2022

Twitter’s board, according to an SEC filing today, is unanimously asking shareholders at an upcoming special meeting to approve Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid to acquire the social media giant.

The official recommendation brings Musk’s buyout of the company one step closer to fruition, mere weeks after the world’s richest man flirted with exiting the deal.

Board members said in the Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the proposed takeover is “advisable and in the best interests of Twitter and its stockholders.” Musk’s buyout offer was for Twitter shareholders to be compensated at $54.20 a share. As of this writing, shares were up about 3% on the day to almost $39.

If completed, the buyout could become a major milestone for crypto. In the months following Musk’s April offer, the billionaire has emphasized that integrating payment services—possibly Dogecoin—with the platform is one of three “critical areas” he intends to prioritize once taking the company private. Musk has repeatedly stated that he intends for Twitter to enable payments in both fiat and crypto.

Last week, while hosting a Q&A session with Twitter employees, Musk recommitted to this goal.

“Money is fundamentally digital at this point,” he reportedly told Twitter personnel. “It would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter so that it’s easy to send money back and forth.”

Though a prominent crypto enthusiast, Musk also has expressed concerns over certain elements of crypto’s online presence. At the same Twitter employee event last week, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO bemoaned the prevalence of crypto scams on Twitter, and he’s previously criticized the platform’s integration of NFTs.

But Musk’s most-cited Twitter-related grievance has been the prevalence of bots and spam. Earlier this month, Musk’s attorneys sent a letter to Twitter, claiming the company was in breach of the merger’s terms by failing to disclose exactly how much of its user base was bot and spam accounts. Twitter has since given Musk access to a “firehose of data” that includes every Tweet ever written.

Experts largely saw that move as an attempt by Musk to gain leverage to renegotiate a better deal.

Get crypto news straight to your inbox--

sign up for the Decrypt Daily below. (It’s free).

Get Email!

United States of Bitcoin? These States Are Considering BTC Reserves

Donald Trump and his political allies are plugging away at plans to stockpile Bitcoin at a national level in the U.S. Treasury. And now, with the asset’s price repeatedly soaring to new peaks since Election Day, some U.S. states are following suit. So far, three states are fielding proposals to establish strategic Bitcoin reserves, while digital asset advocates are calling for other local governments to do the same. Bitcoin Strategic Reserve Is Now on the Table—Here's How It Could Work Here'...

AI Won’t Tell You How to Build a Bomb—Unless You Say It’s a 'b0mB'

Remember when we thought AI security was all about sophisticated cyber-defenses and complex neural architectures? Well, Anthropic's latest research shows how today’s advanced AI hacking techniques can be executed by a child in kindergarten. Anthropic—which likes to rattle AI doorknobs to find vulnerabilities to later be able to counter them—found a hole it calls a “Best-of-N (BoN)” jailbreak. It works by creating variations of forbidden queries that technically mean the same thing, but are expre...

Elon Musk and Dogecoin: How the Billionaire Became the 'Dogefather'

As Dogecoin makes a comeback off the back of Bitcoin’s surge, some may be pondering: Where did the asset come from? What’s it for? And what’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk got to do with it? The original meme coin’s boom largely has the world’s richest man to thank. Musk’s obsession with shitposting helped boost the coin to a top 10 cryptocurrency. It’s been a wacky ride over the past few years, culminating in Musk's appointment to co-lead a government agency called D.O.G.E.—yes, really. But we'll explai...

News

Courses

Deep Dives

Coins

Videos