Forty-three billion dollars is a lot of money, even for the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk. That is approximately what Musk is offering to pay to buy Twitter, one of the most influential social networks in the world. And as usual, the typical suspects and loud mouths line up on their respective sides of the aisle to offer up their two cents of wisdom.
Let’s take a factual look at what’s happened to date in the takeover battle and then fill you in on why it’s worth much more than money to Musk and other likeminded thinkers.
Musk sent Twitter’s stock soaring last week after he revealed through a tweet that he had filed an offer with the SEC to buy the American social media company. The stock rose more than 18% at its peak, and retained a 5% increase in price through that Tuesday morning. He offered a price of $54.20 a share which amounts to a value of about $43 billion.
The company has an existing market valuation of about $37 billion based upon its current price. The opening salvo had thus begun in the paper war for Twitter. When Musk first made his roughly 9% investment he caught the company and the world in general off guard.
He was immediately given a seat on the board of directors, whereby Musk, being the outspoken mercurial individual that he is, would not seek to publicly take his new found stock interest to task. In fact, he did the contrary.
He wrote a letter to Twitter’s board stating, “Twitter has extraordinary potential,” he wrote. “I will unlock it.” Well, that was the pinnacle of the relationship. After further thought Musk decided he didn’t want a seat on the board and thought about increasing his stake or acquiring the entire company outright.
This is when the shiver went down the spine of the spineless Parag Agrawal, CEO of Twitter. How wonderful it is to live in a land where an Indian foreign national can lecture Americans on free speech and his right to censure you if you don’t think like him. Beautiful! So now you see why the Musk bid has less to do with money, he doesn’t need it, and everything to do with the first amendment.
Wondering if Mr. Agrawal learned that on the streets of Calcutta or at the cesspool of lower learning, Stanford that he attended. But I digress.
What will we do, cried George Soros and the brown shirts on the left who are awaiting their marching orders on how to only let speech be free if it is their speech? We’ll poison him, that’s what we’ll do, cried the angry mob. Many were disturbed only to find out that the poison was a euphemism for a poison pill, and could not physically harm Musk, but hinder his ability to take control of the company.
On Friday, the board put in place a poison pill, also known as a shareholder rights plan, to fend off Musk, who currently owns about 9% of Twitter shares. The measure would make it more expensive for Musk or anyone else to increase their stake in the company to 15% or more. The first volley has been fired back by Twitter in the name of free censorship for only them.
It should be important to you that Musk or like minds win this battle, because if that were to happen, we could see a return of free speech in the United States and nothing should give you more hope than that possibility.
So what happens next? While the Twitter board and like-minded leftists are scouring through the totalitarian play books of their predecessors Marx, Mao, Lenin, etc. to find a way to only let the masses, the workers, understand and hear what they want them to hear.
What has been rather easy of late will take a taciturn if Musk has his way. Musk has tweeted several times in recent days that shareholders should have the say in a final sale. How novel.
On Saturday, Musk tweeted “Love Me Tender,” the name of an Elvis Presley song. Some observers took that as a hint that he may try to appeal directly to Twitter shareholders with what’s known as a tender offer, naming a price at which he’d buy their shares. The parties just getting started though, as Wall Street can smell blood in the water and want to take a bite into this deal.
According to the New York Post, the private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which owns software companies including antivirus provider McAfee, is working on a potential bid for Twitter. In addition, on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apollo Global, a buyout firm, is also interested in wading into the waters to help finance a Musk bid or potentially another suitor.
It’s hard to believe that the world’s richest man is the only person who could fix this problem. You’d like to think our democratic systems could fix it, but clearly they can’t. So, Elon Musk seems to be our last hope at the moment. Like Agrawal, Musk did not grow up in America, but in South Africa, and unlike Agrawal, Musk has a keen understanding of how our system was designed to work.
As he tweeted recently, “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.” Contrast that with recent comments made by Agrawal, denoting “Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard,” he went on. “And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content … how we direct people’s attention.” I wonder if he was wearing one of Jack Dorsey’s tie-die tee shirts when he made those remarks.
Perhaps tie-die is the new brown shirt for those who profess to manipulate and indoctrinate in the square of public opinion.
