Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for a reported $43 billion in cash – Space.com

Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter.

The billionaire founder and CEO of SpaceX, who also runs Tesla, announced his bid to buy the social media company Thursday (April 14) on the Twitter platform itself and shared a link to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing he submitted as part of the process.

"I made an offer," Elon Musk wrote on Twitter, where he has over 80 million followers.

Musk laid out his plan for what could be the ultimate Twitter takeover in a letter to Bret Taylor, the chair of Twitter's board and Salesforce co-CEO. In the letter, Musk offered to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash. The SpaceX CEO already owns a 9.2% stake in Twitter, which was announced earlier this month. If the sale goes through, Musk would pay $43 billion in cash to buy Twitter, according to Reuters.

"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," Musk wrote in the letter. "However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company."

Related: 8 ways SpaceX has transformed spaceflight

Musk wrote that his offer to buy Twitter represented a 54% premium over what he paid for his initial stake, and a 385% premium over Twitter's stock price from just before his first investment was announced.

"My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder," Musk wrote in the letter. "Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it."

Musk is a prolific Twitter user who regularly uses the platform to share updates on SpaceX and Tesla operations, his personal thoughts on current events along with jokes, images and memes. At times, Musk's Twitter use has led to trouble, like in 2018 when the SEC sued the billionaire for fraud over a tweet in August of that year in which he wrote that he had secured funding to take Tesla, a public company, private at $420 per share.

Musk and Tesla each paid a reported $20 million fine to settle the dispute with the SEC.

According to Forbes, Musk is currently the richest person in the world and has a current net worth of about $302 billion, about a third more than his space rival Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, who has a net worth of about $194 billion.

Email Tariq Malik attmalik@space.comor follow him@tariqjmalik. Follow us@Spacedotcom,FacebookandInstagram.

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Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for a reported $43 billion in cash - Space.com