Elon Musk Proposes to Buy Twitter at Original Offer Price: Report

Tesla CEO Elon Musk looks to be giving up on terminating his $44 billion USD bid for social media giant Twitter, now proposing to go through with the acquisition on the original terms — reports Bloomberg.

According to Bloomberg‘s sources, Musk proposed closing the deal for the original offer price of $54.20 USD per share in a letter to Twitter. The Wall Street Journal has corroborated the original report, citing a source with knowledge of the matter.

News of Musk wanting to follow through on his offer comes less than two weeks before he and Twitter were set to meet in court for a five-day trial. Twitter was scheduled to depose Musk on October 6-7 ahead of the October 17 trial to determine the fate of their merger.

Trading of Twitter shares was suspended after the news broke today. Twitter’s stock price has surged as much as 18% in the hours since.

Musk filed to terminate his bid for Twitter in July due to a “material breach” of the pair’s agreement on Twitter’s part. Twitter sued the electric vehicle magnate to keep up his end of their deal.

In the months that followed, Musk repeatedly reinforced his desire to back out of the deal and publicly expressed his frustrations with Twitter over the company allegedly understating the number of “bot” accounts on its platform and withholding information needed to independently verify those calculations.

The cause of Musk’s change of heart remains unclear. Did the celebrity billionaire lose faith in the strength of his case to terminate the deal? Or has Musk determined that Twitter is worth $44 billion even with all the bots on the platform? Let us know what you think in the comments below.