Elon Musk said his $44 billion deal to buy twitter still has three pending issues which will need to be resolved.
Musk was speaking Tuesday at Bloomberg’s Qatar Economic Forum by teleconference. He said that the first issue is that he has been unable to confirm Twitter’s claim that fake and spam accounts comprise less than 5% of active users, “which I think is probably not most people’s experience when using Twitter. So we are still awaiting resolution on that matter. And that is a very significant matter.”
Twitter maintains it is sharing all data with Musk, but he apparently does not feel that is the case.
The other two issues Musk said were that the debt portion of the deal needs to fully come together, and that his bid will require shareholder approval.
He said, “Those are the three things that… need to be resolved before the transaction can be complete.”
Musks $44 billion offer to buy twitter is made up of 27.25 billion in equity financing, $6.25 billion in margin loans, and $10.5 billion in debt financing. Musk has so far lined up financing from Larry Elison, Oracle’s co-founder, Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar, Sequoia Capital, cryptocurrency exchange Binance.com, and a16z, the VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
Twitter’s shareholder vote on the Musk takeover will be later this summer. It has been unanimously recommended by Twitter’s Board of Directors.
Even though Twitter was up more than 2% on Tuesday it was still trading under $39 per share, almost 30% below Musk’s offer of $54.20 per share.
It the conference, Musk was asked if there was any limit on who should be allowed to use twitter.
Musk replied. “My aspiration for Twitter, or in general for the digital town square, would be that it is as inclusive in the broadest sense of the word as possible. It obviously cannot be a place where [people] feel uncomfortable or harassed, or they’ll simply not use it.”
Musk advocated a forum where people could say whatever they wanted, but users had the ability to filter it out if they did not want to hear it. He noted ideally he would like to get 80% of North America or half the world on Twitter in some way.
Asked if he will be the CEO of Twitter, Musk said, “I would drive the product, which is what I do at SpaceX and Tesla… Whether I am called the CEO or something else is much less important than my ability to drive the product in the right direction.”
