Twitter board recommends shareholders vote for Elon Musk’s takeover

The Twitter board has unanimously recommended that shareholders vote in favor of Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media giant.

Twitter’s board of directors initially accepted the $44 billion takeover bid at $54.20 per share in late April, and shareholder approval is the final hurdle to the deal going through bar any potentially erratic antics from Musk.

According to a June 21 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, Twitter’s board of directors unanimously determined that the “merger agreement is advisable” and have called on shareholders to vote in favor of the deal.

The board stated that Twitter will be hosting a virtual meeting — at an unspecified date — to vote on the merger which has a deadline of Oct. 24.

If the merger goes through, shareholders will receive $54.20 in cash per share that they own, and with Twitter stock TWTR priced at $38.91 at the time of writing, the deal would mark a premium of roughly 39%.

The takeover appeared to be up in the air earlier this month after Musk took aim at the Twitter board for not providing data relating to the number of fake users on the platform, and he threatened to withdraw his bid if the data wasn’t handed over.

The board has since agreed to share data with Musk, and the issue has been resolved. Many onlookers believed that Musk was attempting to get out of the deal as a result of the share price fall since the takeover offer was first made.

An indication that Musk seriously intends to push forward with his takeover came on June 16, when the Tesla CEO addressed employees for the first time in a Q&A session concerning his plans for the company moving forward.

According to a leaked transcript of the call published by Vox, Musk suggested that he could be looking to integrate a host of digital payments into the service, including crypto:

“I think it would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter so that it’s easy to send money back and forth. And if you have currency as well as crypto. Essentially, whenever somebody would find it useful.”

“So my goal would be to maximize the usefulness of the service — the more useful it is, the better. And if one can use it to make convenient payments, that’s an increase in usefulness,” he added.

Bots and verifying accounts was also another issue he highlighted, with Musk outlining the value of introducing paid verified accounts to enable users to differentiate between real and fake users.

Related: Elon Musk gets hit with ‘ridiculous’ $258B Dogecoin lawsuit

Musk highlighted there being “quite a lot of crypto scams on Twitter” as being of the key reasons to introduce such a feature.

The issue is especially close to home for the Dogecoin proponent, given that a series of deepfake videos using his likeness to promote crypto scams recently circulated on the social media platform.