Elon Musk’s plans to transform Twitter, whose purchase was agreed on April 25 for $44 billion, appear to go beyond cutting staff or launching some paid features. According to him Wall Street Journalthe tycoon would have considered making twitter public again just three years after acquiring the company.
The aforementioned medium, which mentions sources familiar with the matter, ensures that Elon Musk is talking with private investment funds to get those 21,000 million dollars that he himself promised to contribute from his own pocket for the purchase of the company. And it is that, although Musk is currently the richest man in the world, he barely has about 3,000 million dollars in cash. Several options have been proposed with which the also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX could obtain sufficient financing to pay that abysmal difference. Among them, getting co-investors or even selling Tesla shares. However, the most viable option seems to be to go to investment funds.
Elon Musk, however, needs to guarantee investors the profitability of the purchase. Sell Twitter through a public offering of actions as a way to earn income in the future, it seems to be the most suitable option. The tycoon, let’s remember, also proposed to bankers to make money with Twitter by laying off employees or creating subscription services on the platform itself, something that would help boost recurring income.
Is three years enough to make Twitter public again?
It’s unclear whether three years is long enough to make Twitter public again. Above all, if we take into account that a private equity firm can take up to five years to restructure a company for it to go public again, according to WSJ. Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter are also quite ambitious and go far beyond the long-awaited button to edit tweets.
The tycoon has promised to make the platform a place where “freedom of expression” prevails. Mainly, allowing any speech and offering greater transparency when it comes to showing how the algorithm of the social network filters the content. It also plans to crack down on bots by implementing a human account verification system, as well as multiple additional platform features and a few corporate changes.
Elon Musk, however, does not seem to have reached an agreement with any investment firm to obtain the liquidity that he himself must provide for the purchase of the social network. In fact, and as stated Reutersthe tycoon could only be analyzing all the options that allow him to definitively close the acquisition of Twitter.