Twitter Is a Buy if Elon Musk Is Negotiating. It’s a Sell if He’s Walking Away.
Elon Musk’s latest broadside against the management of
Twitter, the company he has offered to buy for $44 billion, looks like either a negotiating tactic or an excuse to abandon the deal.
The hard part is
figuring out which.
Musk on Tuesday tweeted that he needed to see proof of management’s claim that fewer than 5% of daily Twitter users are spam or bot accounts for the deal to go ahead.
That was a more considered response than the one he gave on Monday, after CEO Parag Agrawal wrote a detailed thread about the difficulty of calculating spam as a percentage of the platform’s usage. Musk replied with a poop emoji.
Musk’s
Tuesday statement added that his offer was conditional on the company’s public statements being accurate. Maybe it’s a way to dispute paying the well-known $1 billion breakup fee Musk agreed to if the deal falls through. Even though, as the world’s richest man worth more than $200 billion, the fee wouldn’t exactly break the bank.
On the other hand, there are also signs that Musk is still very serious about making the deal happen. Bloomberg reported that he told a conference that doing the deal at a lower price wasn’t “out of the question.”
The
Tesla CEO may also be selling SpaceX shares, the proceeds from which could be used to finance the deal, the
New York Post reported. He already has financial backing from big names such as
Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison and the Qatari sovereign-wealth fund.
Twitter fell more than 8% on Monday and continued dropping in the premarket. Whatever price Musk eventually is able to get, it will almost surely be higher than the current share price. The only thing an investor has to determine is what Musk wants. He may not even know that himself.