Elon Musk will speak to Twitter employees on Thursday, June 16, 2022, for the first time since launching his $44bn (£36.2bn) bid for the company in April 2022.
The event was announced by Twitter’s Chief Executive, Parag Agrawal, in an email to staff on Tuesday, June 14, 2022. Mr. Agrawal told employees they could submit questions to Mr. Musk in advance of the meeting.
The multi-billionaire Tesla boss is expected to take questions from Twitter’s workers at the meeting. Ahead of the upcoming meeting, Mr. Musk warned he may quit the deal if the firm fails to provide data about fake accounts on the platform.
Issue of Fake Accounts
The all-hands meeting will mark the first time Mr. Musk will be speaking directly with the company’s workforce since launching his takeover bid. Earlier this month (June 2022), he threatened to walk away from the deal, accusing the social media company of “thwarting” his requests to learn more about its user base.
In a letter filed with regulators, Mr. Musk said he is entitled to do his own measurement of spam accounts. The letter formalised a dispute that simmered for weeks after he declared the deal “on hold” pending further information.
Elon Musk said on May 13, 2022, that he is putting his bid to acquire Twitter on hold, weeks after agreeing to take the company private in a $44 billion deal. In a Twitter post, Musk said “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users”.
The news initially sent Twitter shares down more than 20% in pre-market trading before the stock rebounded somewhat. Two hours after his first tweet, Musk posted that he is “still committed to acquisition”. In his tweet about putting the deal on hold, Musk linked it to a May 2, 2022 report about Twitter’s most recent disclosure about its spam and fake account problem.
In its quarterly financial report, released on April 28, Twitter estimated that fake or spam accounts made up fewer than 5% of the platform’s active users during the first three months of the year. Twitter noted that the estimates were based on a review of sample accounts and it believed the numbers to be “reasonable”. But it acknowledged that the measurements were not independently verified and the actual number of fake or spam accounts could be higher.
Analysts Viewpoint
According to Analysts, Mr. Musk might be using the issue to try to renegotiate the price or even walk away from the deal. They said his decision to raise the matter on social media was unconventional, making it difficult to establish how serious he is.
When Mr. Agrawal defended the company’s process for identifying fake accounts in a series of tweets, Mr Musk responded with a poo emoji. As it is currently, the company’s shares stood at $37.03 each at the end of New York trading on Monday, June 13, 2022, well below Mr. Musk’s offer price of $54.20.
Flouting Convention
The manner in which Musk announced the deal’s pause, in a tweet, was also unusual, at least by normal corporate merger and acquisition standards.
Acquirers of a company typically conduct due diligence, a review of the firm’s finances and proprietary information, before a deal closes. In that process, they may come across information that causes them to rethink the deal or its valuation, but typically such a revelation would be disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
“Usually we’d see some sort of filing that would come first, an amendment to previous filings on the deal, that says, ‘we’ve uncovered some information in the process of due diligence and we’re reconsidering our acquisition,'” Assistant Professor of Finance at Vanderbilt University and a Former Financial Economist for the SEC, Josh White, said.
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