In the final showdown before he seals the $44 billion deal after so many hiccups, mega-billionaire Elon Musk entered Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco carrying a porcelain sink on Wednesday. As per the court-mandated orders, the world's richest man must close the Twitter deal on Friday. True to his humorous and witty character, perfectly summed up by his tweets on everything from electric cars, and space adventures to the Russia-Ukraine war and memes on fellow billionaires, Musk posted a video on Twitter. In this, he can be seen chuckling and carrying a sink as he enters the Twitter office, with the caption "Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!".
"Meeting a lot of cool people at Twitter today!," he said, while also changing his Twitter bio to "Chief Twit" and location to Twitter's San Francisco headquarters. Before that, Musk had tweeted: "A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias."
His latest visit to Twitter’s headquarters is also in sharp contrast to claims he made back in April when he become Twitter’s largest shareholder. He had said Twitter SF HQ should be converted to a "homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway".
Musk, who is the third most followed person (110.1 million) on the microblogging platform after former US president Barack Obama and singer Justin Bieber, was ordered by the Delaware Chancery Court in early October to consumate the controversial deal. After a lot of backtracking, Musk said he would buy Twitter at the agreed $54.20 per share price if debt financing could be secured.
To fulfils his obligation, the Tesla CEO has pledged to provide $46.5 billion in equity and debt financing. For this, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Corp, amongst other banks, have committed to provide $13 billion as debt financing to him. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle Corp, and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal have also assured $7.1 billion.
The closing of the deal will mark an end to a public battle between Musk and Twitter, which saw many flip flops by Musk, forcing Twitter to move court against him. He accused Twitter of having weak leadership and targetted it on many occasions for its inability to reveal acutal number of bot or spam accounts operating on the platform.
Though it seems clear that Musk will execute the deal on Friday, if he doesn't, the trial in the case will start in November.
Separately, much to the anger of the existing Twitter employees, the mega-billionaire is also planning to cut the Twitter's workforce by about 75% from 7,500 to about 2,000, according to a US-based global news daily. Also, even if the deal is not sealed before the court-set deadline of October 28, the big churning at the microblogging company is inevitable. The reason is Twitter, even before the deal with Musk, had planned to initiate some cost-saving plans, which were then put on hold in light of the takeover agreement with Musk. The company is reportly eying to reduce its overall cost and employee payroll by about $800 million by 2023.
