Elon Musk Secures Funds for Possible Twitter Tender Offer – CNET [CNET]

Elon Musk is exploring the possibility of launching a tender offer for Twitter — and he’s secured $46.5 billion in funding to help finance the deal, according to an updated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It comes after the Tesla CEO offered to buy Twitter last week for $54.20 a share, or $43 billion in total.

A tender offer is an active and widespread bid to purchase some or all of shareholders’ stock in a corporation. It can be made by the corporation itself, but also by a third party, as is the case here, to purchase a substantial percentage of the company’s shares. 

Musk hinted at this on Tuesday by tweeting “_______ is the Night,” referring to American author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is the Night.

Already owning more than 9% of Twitter, Musk has been on an exhausting campaign to buy the social media platform. An avid user of the platform, with nearly 83 million followers, he is also a prominent critic of Twitter the company. 

On Friday, Twitter adopted a defensive tactic — a limited-duration shareholder rights plan, also known as a “poison pill” — to ward off a hostile takeover by Musk. 

Now, it seems, Musk is looking to Twitter’s shareholders themselves, offering them a premium for their shares with his tender offer. (Twitter is currently trading at $46.67 a share.) The poison pill doesn’t prevent him from doing this, and so if he launches the tender offer, it’ll be up to the public whether Musk will become the new owner of the world’s virtual town square.