A ‘420’ joke to done deal: Musk’s Twitter takeover

NEW YORK: Elon Musk’s $54.20-per-share offer price for the social media company on April 14 contained the digits 420, a reference to a trope for smoking marijuana. Financing documents he submitted last week in support of his bid were signed on April 20, abbreviated as 4/20.

Such references harken back to his 2018 “funding secured” tweet stating that he was considering taking electric car maker Tesla Inc private for $420 per share. Tesla and Musk subsequently agreed to pay $20 million each to settle charges that he misled investors.

Musk said he rounded the price up to $420 because he had recently learned about the number’s significance in marijuana culture and thought his girlfriend would find it funny, “which admittedly is not a great reason to pick a price,” according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission complaint filed at the time.

Discussions with Twitter turned serious, however, when the San Francisco-based company’s advisers, including bankers at Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Jpmorgan Chase & Co and Allen & Co, started poring through Musk’s financing documents in support of his $44 billion bid on April 21.

Many of the biggest Wall Street banks, led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Corp and Barclays Plc, committed to providing $25.5 billion in debt, some of it secured against Twitter and some of it tied to Musk’s Tesla stock. Musk himself committed another $21 billion in cash.

Twitter’s board, which was still reviewing Musk’s bid after he had presented it with little detail a week earlier, went into overdrive. It rushed to complete an analysis to assign a value on its standalone plan which Parag