• by Joe Mandese , April 25, 2022

Twitter Inc. has entered a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk for $54.20 per share in a transaction valued at $44 billion.

Once completed, Twitter, which is currently traded on the New York Stock Exchange, will become a privately held company.

Under terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction.

The company said the purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter's closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter, and began an on-again, off-again bid to acquire the company.

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said in a statement, which some have inferred to mean he plans to remove barriers to users that have been suspended from the platform for violating community standards.

"I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features," he added, "making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."

The company said Musk has secured $25.5 billion of fully committed debt and margin loan financing and is providing an approximately $21.0 billion equity commitment, but did not disclose where it was coming from.

There are no financing conditions to the closing of the transaction.