Who wants to own Twitter? Maybe Elon Musk doesn’t. Sure, maybe he is causing chaos to extract a lower price from the Twitter board, but he just as well may walk away altogether and create a Twitter clone. There is a “60%+ chance from our view Musk ultimately walks from the deal and pays the breakup fee,” analyst Dan Ives said Tuesday.
But for now the board is trying to hold him to it. On Tuesday morning, hours after Musk tweeted that “this deal cannot move forward” until his purported spam bot concerns are cleared up, the company filed its proxy statement for Musk’s takeover and said it wants to close the deal “as promptly as practicable.”
The board, in other words, wants to rid itself of Twitter. I obtained a new statement from the board Tuesday night that read, “The Board and Mr. Musk agreed to a transaction at $54.20 per share. We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement.” Key words:…
