Tesla CEO Elon Musk has offered to buy micro-blogging and social media platform Twitter for $43 billion. He made this update known in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.
Musk’s offer price of $54.20 per share was 38% higher than the closing price of Twitter’s stock on 1 April, the day before his investment of 9.2% was publicly announced. The $54.20 per share represents a 54% premium over the 28 January closing price and about a $43 billion valuation.
Musk sent a letter to the Twitter chairman Bret Taylor saying:
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.
“Since making my investment, I now realise the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.
“Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.
“My offer is my best and final offer, and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.”
There are speculations about why Elon Musk decided not to be part of the Twitter Inc board, and many experts have concluded that his ambition to buy Twitter will be impossible as a board member. Musk currently owns 73,486,938 Twitter shares, presently worth £3.3 billion.
Elon Musk’s Influence on Dogecoin and Crypto
Elon Musk’s news about joining the Twitter board came with many expected reactions and anticipations, especially from the crypto community. As a result, the Tesla boss proposed a couple of changes to the Twitter Blue premium service. These include dogecoin payments, a price reduction, and authentication checkmarks.
Replying to a user asking for the fee to be lower in Argentina since an entire family eats for US$3 there, Musk agreed that it “should be proportionate to affordability & in local currency.” In addition, he suggested that one of the payment options could be “to pay in dogecoin.”
Twitter had said last year that it planned to support authentication for NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which are digital assets such as images or videos that exist on a blockchain. With Elon Musk on board, not only will these goals become a reality, Twitter will be a home for the most prominent cryptocurrency community, which will boost the popularity of digital currencies, including dogecoin.
It is not surprising that the comments about dogecoin from the self-proclaimed godfather of Dogecoin, Musk, boosted the price of the memecoin. At the time of his tweet, DOGE was trading at $0.144240, and it rose 8.45% to $0.156430 at that time.
