Twitter Thought Weed-Smoking Musk's Offer Wasn't Serious: Reuters

Twitter, Inc. and its advisers were not sure at first how seriously to take him. 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.

Photo Insert: Elon Musk smoking pot on the show of Joe Rogan, an equally controversial public figure

Financing documents he submitted last week in support of his bid were signed on April 20, abbreviated as 4/20, Krystal Hu and Anirban Sen reported for Reuters.

Such references harken back to his 2018 "funding secured" tweet stating that he was considering taking electric car maker Tesla 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 US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint filed at the time.

Discussions with Twitter turned serious, however, when the San Francisco-based firm’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 big Wall Street banks, led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, 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 Agrawal, five months into his role as Twitter chief executive, was delivering on.

And it asked its bankers to triple-check if there was any other bidder who could offer more than Musk. The board finally found that no white knight was around.

The Associated Press (AP) reported that experts who have studied content moderation and researched Twitter for years have expressed doubt that Musk knows exactly what he is getting into.

After all, there are plenty of fledgling examples of “free speech” focused platforms launched in the past few years as Twitter antidotes, largely by conservatives unhappy with the company’s crackdowns on hate, harassment, and misinformation.

Many have struggled to deal with toxic content, and at least one has been cut off by its own technology providers in protest.

WEEKLY FEATURE : MVP Group Keeps Lights On During Pandemic