Twitter’s shareholders passed a vote and came out completely positive that they want to sell their shares to Elon Musk at the agreed price of $54.2. They had a short conference call with the company’s executives at San Francisco headquarters and they closed in on the decision to sell.
What this essentially means is that Twitter will now try and force Elon Musk into buying the company. All shareholders are hoping to sell their shares at the agreed price. Way over the actual stock market price of the company at the moment.
Twitter Shareholders Want To Push Elon Musk Into Definitely Buying The Company For $44 Billion
The shareholders had the meeting just after the alleged whistleblower Peiter Zatko, the former head of security at Twitter, held a shocking testimony.
The Twitter deal has been dragging since April. The company initially accepted Elon Musk’s offer to acquire it since the bid was made at a time when the share prices were topping $54.2. Before and after that, the price has not been even close to this. However, since then, Musk decided to flee the deal due to being initially misled by Twitter about the percentage of spam and bot accounts on the platform.
Elon Musk finally backed out of the deal back in May, but Twitter is not accepting the backing off. They argue that according to the deal, he is obliged to proceed with the purchase.
From Twitter, they claim that the bot and spam account percentage on the platform is no more than 5%. However, Elon Musk performed his own studies and claimed that the number of bots is way higher than that. He is mentioning numbers like 20% and even more.
Another highly important point is that at the moment Twitter is worth around $32 billion. That is $12 billion lower than the agreed price.
The vote that the shareholders made yesterday could’ve changed the situation dramatically. If they voted for not selling the company, Elon Musk would’ve been free from the deal now. However, they unanimously voted for selling their shares. So the company has the final green light for pushing Musk into buying.
Elon Musk and Twitter are to enter a legal battle in October, at the Delaware state court. The final outcome of the case would be a decision on whether Musk will need to proceed with the deal, or can flee it.
Days before Twitter shareholders decided on selling the company ‘by any means’, the former head of security at Twitter, Peiter Zatko testified in Washington before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the security flaws of the company.
In his testimony, Zatko says that the company is ‘misleading the public’ about its security. He explained that the data that Twitter acquires from you is easily accessible and purposely shared with clients.
Twitter says that they fired Zatko and that is why he makes the claims. And Zatko doubles down and says that Twitter is a decade behind security standards. Zatko also supported Elon Musk’s claim about the spam bots on the platform, without giving an elaboration on the matter.
The Delaware court judge gave permission to Elon Musk to use the whistleblower’s testimony in court. The testimony largely focused on national security issues. However, Musk’s lawyers may find a way to spin it in their favor.
