Twitter Re-examines Elon Musk’s Bid, May Be More Receptive to a Deal

interesting news I came across

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TL;DR: Twitter Inc. is re-examining Elon Musk’s $43 billion takeover offer after the billionaire lined up financing for the bid. Two sides are meeting Sunday to discuss takeover bid, people familiar with the matter say. Twitter is expected to weigh in on the bid when it reports first-quarter earnings Thursday, if not sooner.

Update: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/ub3qbp/twitter_under_shareholder_pressure_to_seek_deal/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

The Wall Street Journal – Twit­ter Inc. is re-ex­am­in­ing Elon Musk’s $43 bil­lion takeover of­fer af­ter the bil­lion­aire lined up fi­nanc­ing for the bid, in a sign the so­cial-me­dia com­pany could be more re­cep­tive to a deal.

Twit­ter had been ex­pected to re­buff the of­fer, which Mr. Musk made ear­lier this month with­out say­ing how he would pay for it. But af­ter he dis­closed last week that he now has $46.5 bil­lion in fi­nanc­ing, Twit­ter is tak­ing a fresh look at the of­fer and is more likely than be­fore to seek to ne­go­ti­ate, peo­ple fa­mil­iar with the mat­ter said. The sit­u­a­tion is fast-mov­ing and it is still far from guar­an­teed Twit­ter will do so.

Twit­ter is still work­ing on an all-im­por­tant es­ti­mate of its own value, which would need to come in close to Mr. Musk’s of­fer, and it could also in­sist on sweet­en­ers such as Mr. Musk agree­ing to cover breakup pro­tec­tions should the deal fall apart, some of the peo­ple said.

The two sides are meet­ing Sun­day to dis­cuss Mr. Musk’s pro­posal, the peo­ple said.

Twit­ter is ex­pected to weigh in on the bid when it re­ports first-quar­ter earn­ings Thurs­day, if not sooner, the peo­ple said. Twit­ter’s re­sponse won’t nec­es­sar­ily be black-and-white, and could leave the door open for invit­ing other bid­ders or ne­go­ti­at­ing with Mr. Musk on terms other than price. Mr. Musk re­it­er­ated to Twit­ter’s chair­man Bret Tay­lor in re­cent days that he won’t budge from his of­fer of $54.20-a-share, the peo­ple said.

The po­ten­tial turn­about on Twit­ter’s part comes af­ter Mr. Musk met pri­vately Fri­day with sev­eral share­hold­ers of the com­pany to ex­tol the virtues of his pro­posal while re­peat­ing that the board has a “yes-or-no” de­ci­sion to make, ac­cord­ing to peo­ple fa­mil­iar with the mat­ter. He also pledged to solve the free-speech is­sues he sees as plagu­ing the plat­form and the coun­try more broadly, whether his bid suc­ceeds or not, they said.

The Tesla Inc. chief ex­ec­u­tive made his pitch to se­lect share­hold­ers in a se­ries of video calls, with a fo­cus on ac­tively man­aged funds, the peo­ple said, in hopes that they could sway the com­pa­ny’s de­ci­sion.

Mr. Musk said he sees no way Twit­ter man­age­ment can get the stock to his of­fer price on its own, given the is­sues in the busi­ness and a per­sis­tent in­abil­ity to cor­rect them. It couldn’t be learned if he de­tailed spe­cific steps he would take, though he has tweeted about want­ing to re­duce the plat­form’s re­liance on ad­ver­tis­ing, as well as to make sim­pler changes such as al­low­ing longer tweets.

Mr. Musk al­ready has some share­hold­ers ral­ly­ing be­hind him fol­low­ing the meet­ings. Lauri Brun­ner, who man­ages Thrivent As­set Man­age­ment LLC’s large-cap growth fund, sees Mr. Musk as a skilled op­er­a­tor. “He has an es­tab­lished track record at Tesla,” she said. “He is the cat­a­lyst to de­liver strong op­er­at­ing per­for­mance at Twit­ter.” Min­neapolis-based Thrivent has a roughly 0.4% stake in Twit­ter worth $160 mil­lion and is also a Tesla share­holder.