As their relationship warms up, Jack Dorsey Weighing back to support Elon Musk‘s pending acquisition Twitter Following the news, the Tesla CEO wants Dorsey to hold a stake and stay.
The co-founder and former CEO of Twitter is still a member of Twitter’s board of directors, but has attacked him as a dysfunctional and was planning to leave at the annual meeting in late May when his term expires.
Dorsey today responded to tweets by Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner of investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. The company agreed to invest $400 million in Elon Musk’s Twitter, One of 18 major Tesla backers lined up to help fund his show, According to the SEC filing.
“Twitter has so much promise as a public domain,” Horowitz said, “it has a myriad of challenging issues ranging from bots to abuse to censorship. Being a public company that relies solely on an advertising business model exacerbates all of these.” He then added, “Elon is the only person we know and perhaps the only person in the world with the courage, the intelligence, and the skills to fix all these things and build the public arena that we all hope and deserve.”
That’s right. Dorsey said.
Musk plans to make the company private in order to put his stamp on a platform that he said should be more free, with less moderation in content. Last week, Dorsey described Musk as “the only solution I trust” to get Twitter to work. “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.” Then he said, “Getting it back from Wall Street is the right first step.”
Twitter documented the exchange in another Securities and Exchange Commission filing Thursday.
Musk has offered to buy existing shareholders for $54.20 a share in a deal worth about $44 billion. He unveiled new financial commitments of more than $7 billion from a group of investors including Larry Ellison, Fidelity, Sequoia Capital, and crypto exchange Binance.
The filing stated that Musk was in discussions with some shareholders, specifically Dorsey mentioned, about the possibility of holding “a capital investment in Twitter after the merger is completed rather than receiving considerations of the merger in the merger.”
One major investor, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who initially described Musk’s bid as too low, would contribute his 34.9 million shares (more than 5% of the company) to the deal.
Separately, CNBC reported today that Musk is expected to serve as Twitter’s interim CEO for a few months after the deal is completed. Dorsey served as CEO until late November 2021 when he stepped down as current CEO Paraj Agrawal.
Twitter shares were among the few gainers in bloodbath in stock market today, 2.65% higher. (Tesla’s price is down more than 8%.)
