Billionaire Elon Musk is expected to propose going ahead with his takeover of Twitter at $54.20 (nearly Rs. 4,400) per share, a Bloomberg news reporter tweeted on Tuesday.
Twitter shares jumped 12.7 percent to $47.93 (nearly Rs. 3,900) before trading was halted for the second time, while Tesla, the electric vehicle company that Musk heads, fell about 3 percent.
Musk made the proposal in a letter to Twitter, Bloomberg reported, citing people who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information.
Twitter and Musk’s lawyers were not immediately available for requests for comment from Reuters.
The news comes ahead of a highly anticipated faceoff between Musk and Twitter in Delaware’s Court of Chancery on October 17, in which the social media company was set to seek an order directing Musk to close the deal at $54.20 per share.
“This is a clear sign that Musk recognized heading into Delaware Court that the chances of winning vs Twitter board was highly unlikely and this $44 billion (nearly Rs. 3,58,500 crore) deal was going to be completed one way or another,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note after the news.
Musk agreed in April to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but within weeks said the number of bot accounts was much higher than Twitter’s estimate of less than 5 percent of users.
Last week, newly disclosed text messages between Musk and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal showed that the two men briefly bonded in the spring over their love of engineering.
The text exchanges were included in redacted documents that Musk lawyers filed early Thursday after challenging a Twitter claim that they couldn’t be made public because they contained sensitive information. Several of the “public versions” of those Twitter documents contain wholesale redactions and are almost entirely blacked out. The documents containing the Musk and Agrawal texts, by contrast, were not.
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