The Twitter Board’s Panic Room

Welcome to a special edition of Dry Powder. And thanks as always for following our work here at Puck.
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Welcome to a special edition of Dry Powder.

And thanks as always for following our work here at Puck.

It’s not every day that the world’s wealthiest man attempts to buy Twitter, so we decided to shake up the schedule here at Dry Powder: I’ll be off on Sunday, and back in your inbox next Wednesday. In the meantime, you can read my analysis of Elon Musk’s $43 billion bid—and why I believe he’s deadly serious—below.

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The Twitter Board’s Panic Room

Most of the takes out there are wrong. Musk is serious. And the Twitter board, Goldman, and its management team better be, too.

WILLIAM D. COHAN

If you want to understand the potential outcomes of Elon Musk’s $43 billion fight to take Twitter private, look at the company’s stock price today, in the immediate aftermath of his hostile offer. Basically, the Twitter stock is flat. It was up about 9 percent in pre-market trading, then slowly drifted back down. Some pundits are concluding that, as a result, the market is not taking Musk’s offer seriously because, you know, Musk is not a serious guy to begin with; his offer is subject to financing (not secured) and due diligence, et cetera—in other words, the same conditions that exist for all deals before they are concluded.

I disagree completely with this premise. I think the reaction of the Twitter stock today represents the market’s conclusion that Musk is a serious guy—at least about this—and that there are no other viable bidders to compete with him. His $54.20 bid for the company, in other words, may well be his highest and best offer, exactly as he said in his latest public filing. “I am not playing the back-and-forth game,” he wrote to the Twitter board. “I have moved straight to the end.”...

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