Twitter on the cheap: Is Elon Musk eyeing a discount?By Charles Gasparino
July 30, 2022
While the chattering classes are obsessing over Elon Musk’s love life (I still can’t figure out if he did or didn’t have that alleged affair or why I should care), the Tesla electric-vehicle king has been busy developing a new and risky strategy to buy Twitter — but at a significantly lower price, bankers with knowledge of the matter tell The Post.
I know it’s conventional wisdom that he wants to back out of the deal; Twitter, he says, is hiding the football on the number of fake accounts and those annoying bots. But as we’ve reported before, bankers who know him are dubious that he really wants to call it quits.
They say he just wants to pay less after Twitter’s stock price cratered with the rest of the tech sector along with Tesla, which serves as Musk’s deal currency (he owns 175 million shares; you do the math).
Now they say there’s more method to Musk’s Twitter-deal madness, even if he’s still rolling the dice in ways that could end up disastrous for him.
The game plan the bankers say Musk is employing is a war of attrition — playing a long game and wearing the enemy down until they capitulate. You essentially kill more of them than they can replace on the battlefield until they surrender.
Musk’s war with Twitter involves a battlefield known as the Delaware Chancery Court, the go-to venue to settle corporate disputes. A trial is set to begin Oct. 17 over Twitter’s lawsuit to compel Musk to make good on his $44 billion initial offer to buy the company.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/07/30/twitter-on-the-cheap-is-elon-musk-eyeing-a-discount/
