Elon Musk Is Back at the Twitter Deal Table

Twitter share soaring and Testlas shares falling. Why the change of heart after spending a fortune a lawyers trying to get out of the deal to buy a company he's now criticized for months? Will tip Twitter just drop it suit or try to get more certainty that Musk will actually go through with it this time? And how will this all impact? Musts roll at Tesla in Spain Sex We've got experts on all angles. Will ask those questions throughout this hour, But first I want to start with

the market reaction. Bloomberg's Ludlow has been across this all day in New York and walk us through the ups and the downs. Yeah, so, I mean Twitter shares surge right the most sense. April fourth, which was the day when Musk first disclosed his stake in Twitter, let alone before he announced that he would try to buy the company and take it private. Ultimately, we ended up with gain of the stock was halted at one point for

volatility and then resume trading. And by that point Muscut updated is thirteen D filing to let us know what go it was going on, and a Twitter spokesman has spoken as well. Let's take a look at this terminal chart, which is the spread, right, the difference between the fifty dollar twenty cents per share price and the current share price, and now it's off the chart, right. We're really closing that gap as we moved towards something that we expect

to happen quite quickly. All of the conditions of the original April agreement have largely been satisfied. And that is what must talks about in his letter to Twitter that was disclosed on Tuesday. He is going with the original terms of the deal. You also mentioned Tesla. We did see that stock pair a gain of as much as six percent after that Bloom Blow scoop closing up by

around three percent. I think what's interesting here is that the feeling in the market is Musk will at some point have to sell some more Tessa stock to cover the equity portion of the financing for this deal. But there's also an element of key Man risk. Right Elon Musk is the CEO of both Tesla and space x. Well, if he is going to buy Twitter, how much of a distraction is that. I know you've got some great guests. You can put that to question too. But we're back

to where we started him. What a day. It's not a done deal yet. So because I've got the letter here, which you can look at Bloomberg dot com, the letter saying we write to know notify you that the Musk parties intend to proceed to the closing of the transaction subject to the conditions set for therein and pending receipts the proceeds of the debt financing. So he's trying to

put some conditions on the deal. We look back in April, Musk raised or secured twelve point five billion dollars of debt financing and an additional five million revolving credit line. That's split between a six point five billion leverage loan, three billions of secure bonds, three billions of unscured bonds. What's changed is yields are soaring the market has changed and it's a really difficult time to sell leverage debt

or buy out debt. And so basically the banks that Musk has engaged we have to go to asset managers and try and get this debt sold. It's a much harder sell in present day than it was back in April, so there's an uncertainty there. But as I said, go

back to the original or April agreement. Look at section two point to the closing and the conditions, and a lot of those conditions are now met, shareholder approval from Twitter, regulatory waiting periods have surpassed, so it could be interesting to see how quickly the closing of this deal proceeds. And as Kurt's going to go through some of the reporting, I think haf and st Je mccule make the Chance Street judge, who was due to preside over the child

in October. She's basically saying, how is this going to go moving forward? Right? She said, come back to us with a proposal. Okay, thank you. We're going to talk to a little bit later in the show. It all started with a Bloomberg scoop, Bloomberg obtaining a letter from Elon Musk's team stating that he wants to go ahead and buy Twitter after all for the original price and

twenty cents a share. Let's get right to Bloombergs Kurt Wagner, who helped break this story, as well as Geruber Kawasaki President and CEO Ross Gerber, who owns Tesla but sold his stake in Twitter over the course of all of this, Kurt, I want to start with you, what is the very very latest that we know? Yeah, I mean you and Edward kind of hitting on it. Right. Obviously, Elon Musk is saying, hey, let's get back to this original deal

that we had in April. Twitter has said, hey, we want to close this at per share, which is what they've been saying all along. Now, you would think, okay, both sides are at the exact same spot, right, that was the agreement that was in April. Now, the fact that there is a little bit of reservation here or hesitation just goes to show how much distrust has you know, come up between these two sides over this process. Right.

So the fact that both of them are saying they want the exact same thing on the same day, and yet people are still waiting to say, well, let's wait until it's officially signed on the dotted line. That just kind of gives you a sense of how this has played out, that that everyone is gonna hold their breath until this becomes final final, which we may find out in the next couple of days. Right, and who can

blame them? Right? As a Tesla investor, Ross, you weren't happy about Elon Musk trying to buy Twitter at all. You got out of Twitter. What are you thinking now? I'm thinking it's gonna make the business books on how not to buy a company. Um, he's literally created a huge loss for himself by really the way he's handled this, because a lot has changed inside Twitter in the last four months as well, and including a mass amount of high quality individuals who worked at Twitter leaving and a

lot more planning on leaving. So he's paying the highest price possible. He's trying to get dead at the worst time possible. He's basically being forced to buy this company. It's not like he changed his heart. I think his lawyers just told him he was gonna lose. And so this is what I thought the whole time, And I got out of this mess because I didn't want to be involved with this mess, and I'm grateful I did. I lost a little money, but but this is a mess.

It's really not great for Ellen. That said, I'm glad that it's going to come to a conclusion and and hopefully as a Tesla investor, we can get back to focusing on the most exciting company in the world. Kurt, let's talk a little bit about how Twitter is digesting this, you know, because they haven't dropped their litigation and talking to my sources, you know, if your Twitter, you're gonna

want some certainty. Is he really serious right now? Is this really what are you hearing from the Twitter camp

about what their next move is? Right Well, to your point, going back to that distrust I was talking about earlier, right there, there's not a lot of incentive for anyone to simply say we're gonna drop everything we're doing because this guy said X. Right, and so I think, you know, my understanding is that Twitter would need to stay or essentially, you know, retract its lawsuit against Musk in order for him to sign this um. Presumably, you know, if they

believe that he's operating in good faith. That would be the next step was that they'd say, okay, the lawsuits over, let's get back to the original agreement. But again, the fact that we're even discussing this, it just shows how fractured that relationship has been. And Emily, we've talked about

this before. What's crazy is this is now who they want to run Twitter, right, A person that they've kind of painted as a liar, someone that they painted as as uh, you know, not prepared to operate the social network, and yet they're fighting to get him to do it.

That's where employees are today, right there, suddenly waking up and saying, okay, now, this kind of in some of their minds worst case scenario is coming true, which means that they're going to have a new boss very shortly, and it's someone that they might not necessarily agree with

on a bunch of different things. Right. And you know, from many perspective, Twitters in a worse position than it was when Elon Musk decided to buy the company because of what's happened with morale, what's happened with folks leaving the company on the Tesla side. Ross. You know, clearly investors are concerned about this, given the reaction to the stock.

Do you believe the concern is more that he might sell Tesla stock to finance this deal, or the key man risk that his attentions are going to be even more divided. So you know, from the perspective of Tesla, he sold a lot of stock already and it's been an overhang all year from those sales. And if he has to sell you know, another couple of billion, it's a huge company and and that will be that and so it takes away that uncertainty either way. I don't

think it's that material from an economic perspective. But I think the second issue brought up is material, which is being CEO of three major companies is not something humans can do well. And so I get that he thinks he can do this, but this is now a media property, which is very different than running a space or e V which are both technology companies, and and the dynamics it takes to run a media company is completely opposite

from his skill set. And that's been more than proven by the way he's handled the employees of Twitter, like at all hands meeting. And I think you guys are being nice saying that there's distrust. It's not distrust, it's hate. They hate him. Okay, he's created a situation. He created it, and I love Ellen, you know, I'm I'm a fan and supporter, don't get me wrong, but I have friends at Twitter and they hate him. So this is like to getting to divorced people who hate each other to

now get married again. Now, if I'm Twitter, I'm not gonna get rid of this lawsuit at all. I'm going to force specific performance on Elon because there's no trust there at all. So this is a really really difficult situation, and I think that it's the risk, the key man risk to Tesla is that now he gets this company and you know, like, tell me what day is gonna

be easy for him at Twitter? And the reality is, Kurt, let me know if I'm right here, I mean, Elon Musk could own Twitter in a matter of days, right, This could all happen really quickly, That's right. Well, all of the kind of stipulations for the deal closing have have already happened, uh, including the shareholder vote, which we you know covered last in September last month, and so

you know, yes, this could all happen very quickly. What I find kind of crazy and sort of ironic and hilarious, right, is that the last guy who are on Twitter essentially was asked to leave because he had two jobs, right, and now the guy who's running Twitter is going to

have three jobs. This has been said before, but the irony here Emily is quite strong strong indeed, uh ross As a Tesla shareholder, what's your biggest concern about how you know he plans to run Twitter, If he plans to run Twitter, how involved he plans to be in management? And what would you like to see. I'm assuming a more hands off approach, you know, this whole face. You know, I don't know how he got himself into this, but you know, and he's a very smart guy, so I

don't know. But that's said, I mean, I just don't know where this goes. Like, uh So, I think the most important thing is that he stayed as much out of politics as possible, And obviously that's just not gonna happen, and it's going to create a lot of a lot of negativity towards him, and and you know, I just it's a really politically difficult environment to have an opinion about politics in the day and age. And of course

you all in the media know this. More than anybody, and and every time he makes political statements, he's attacked mercilessly, and much of it for good reason. So that I think is the problem with him run in Twitter is it put some square in the face of a lot of issues that have nothing to do with Tesla that

will affect people's perception of Tesla. And you know, I think it's there's a point at time where Tesla is a big enough company, and it's it's now where it's not that it's like Ellen needs to give a little bit of control up so that investors feel more confident about the secession plan. This is what I've been talking about for like years, that there needs to be a strong number too at Tesla and there needs to be

a deeper management best bench. And Tesla tells me all the time how great all these young people are, which I agree, but I'm like, you need to promote these people and you need to show and give these people some power over the business, because the perception right now is exactly what you're saying, is now this guy runs three public companies and in different industries, Like once again,

I don't think that's possible. So something's got to give, and you know, hopefully it's not Tesla, that's for sure, And Kurt, four weeks away from an election. Um, you know how our folks at Twitter thinking about this if this does happen right in a matter of days. The election is four weeks away. And Ellen has said repeatedly he doesn't you know, agree with a lot of Twitter's policies.

He doesn't necessarily think they're necessary. Right, these are things that have been kind of implemented over years, right over

multiple election cycles. And uh, you know, the big one, of course, is he said he would bring back President Donald Trump on the Twitter if if he was owning the company, right, and there is a chance that all of those different things could come, you know, into play over these next couple of weeks in the lead up to the US mid terms and and you know, not even looking ahead to whatever happens in four So I do think that there's a lot of people who are

very conscious of that. We're probably very worried about that, mostly because they just don't exactly know what he's going to repeal or take away if he indeed, you know, becomes a CEO, and how quickly they would move on something like that. But given where we are with this election. It has to be noted that that that kind of stuff could play a factor. It's gonna be hard, probably impossible to stay out of politics given the timing. Okay,

Bloomer's Kurt Wagner, thank you. We're going to continue to watch your reporting. Great job breaking that story. Gerber's Kawasaki President and CEO, Ross Gerber, always appreciate your commentary here. Thank you. All right. Today's big story Elon Muska Green to buy Twitter at the original price. What does it all mean for the months long legal battle between the two.

Let's bring into a law school's associate Dean and Lipton for more and from a legal perspective, given Elon Musk has already spent a lot of money trying to make this go away, what do you think changed on his end? I think, um, in many ways this is almost the most expected outcome of all, which is settling on the eve of trial just before deposition of the main players, the Elon Musk himself. I mean in that sense it's actually very traditional sort of settlement, and so he doesn't

want to be deposed. He has, you know, probably some embarrassing text messages and conflicting statements and all of that would make for a very unpleasant deposition for him. He is was scheduled to be deposed later this week. Everyone on Twitter's end has been deposed, So perhaps you're right he didn't want to go through that process. But it's not really a settlement at all because he's not essentially winning anything. I mean, the price is the same. Yeah, yeah,

he's he Yeah. I mean I think the idea must be something like um uh, Twitter already took a shareholder vote. Uh. To go back to the shareholders and ask them to accept less would not only be time, it would be time consuming, It would be embarrassing. Twitter would have to explain why it was doing this when in fact it's in a very strong legal position. And if the goal year is to stop the proceedings in court, there may

not have been enough time. I mean, trial was supposed to start in two weeks, getting the papers together just to have a second share hold the vote, would you know, very possibly not get the goal of stopping the delaware of proceedings going forward. So that is ultimately likely. It is part of must thinking in terms of not even pushing further to get a couple of dollars off the price. Interesting,

so walk as there. How this will likely play out in court because if you're Twitter, you're wanting to get some certainty that he really means it. This time he threw in some language about dead financing and a condition, and I'm sure that's making the Twitter folks say, hey, what does he mean by this? Could they still go to a judge and ask the judge to somehow uh, you know, be part of the agreement or somehow further enforce an agreement. Yeah, I think, and I think that's

probably what Twitter wants. I mean, the defining thing thing was always a condition for him to follow through, So I don't think that necessarily adds anything like he was always, um not going to be under an obligation to close unless he at the debt financing in place. But I think that um, but his his letter was very kneeling. Now it's very unclear exactly how much he was committing

to in that letter. And Twitter obviously is not gonna want to give up its trial date and undo the depositions that are scheduled or what other proceivings are scheduled. It's not gonna want to change any of that until it's rock solid that this is for real, absolutely definitely happening,

no bacsies. So they might seek some kind of court order that requires him to go through with the deal, or some kind of court representation that he's not going to make any additional arguments and so forth, and gathered that's exactly what they're going to be trying to work out next and being told that's called a consent judgment.

Is that what you're talking about by a court order? Yeah? Yeah, it could be something like that, some kind of you know, exactly some kind of judgment by the court that he has agreed to uh buy the company in particular price, go through whatever that needs to go through, and that way, if he defies it and he's defined a court order of using the chance of court, given all of these you know, legal issues to work out, is it your understanding that this could happen in a matter of days.

Do you think it's likely we get to that October seventeenth trial date or that this is you know, said and done before then. I think it's very possible it's going to be done. I mean, obviously Twitter is suspicious. Twitter is you know, suspicious that this is some kind of game by must to delay things and they don't want to let that happen. And if he is actually trying to play some town of game, then obviously we're

still going to go forward everything. But I think it's very likely that this is serious and as soon as must can get the assurances the Twitter needs, UM, things can probably happen very quickly. After that. The company has already gotten the regulatory aprouvals and the shareholder approval that it needs to close, so it's really just a matter of getting the financing and that probably won't take very long. So yes, I think that this could definitely close soon.

And uh with the trial date will will be suspended that there won't be a trial. I think that's very long. So after let's say that happens Moscow's Twitter, you know, we're a few weeks out from an election, what happens? You know, how quickly could he just start making changes? Right? I mean, you know, he's in charge of the company, and he can make whatever changes. Lots I suppose he orders it on. The question is whether he really does

want to. I mean, I think um, part of the reason that he may have gotten cold feet about the whole deal was because he didn't necessarily want to change responsibility for all of that. And I don't know if he wants to thrust himself into that kind of political spotlight right away, but I mean, you know, once it's his company, he can order what he wants, all right.

So much to continue to tease out here, to continue to follow and lipped into Lane Law School's associate Dean always appreciate you um sharing your legal perspective with us. Thank you. We're gonna have much more come up next. Stay with us. This is Bloomberg. Some more stories were following micro and I said it plans to invest as much as a hundred billion dollars over the next twenty years to build a factory in upstate New York. This in an effort to boost US production of memory chips.

The company says this is the largest private investment in New York state history. This comes in conjunction with the investment that we had announced in Boise a few weeks ago the leading edge memory manufacturing fab Data as well, and the two together with helpers bring our domestic production to by the end of the decade versus ten percent currently meantime. Tesla rival Rivan reported progress in ramping up production. Van also reaffirmed its goals building electric vehicles this year.

Rivan says it produced more than seventy three hundred cars in the third quarter. Will have more on that later this hour. And Meta plans to close one of its New York offices as the company winds back expansion plans in the city. According to Bloomberg sources, Meta has been consolidated it's New York workforce, building out offices and Hudson Yards, and moving ahead with other office plans near Penn Station. Last week, met It announced the hiring freeze and restructuring.

Welcome back to Bloomer Technology and Emily Chang in San Francisco. Back to today's top story. Are at Ludlow, Uh and the whole newsroom really following the Musk Twitter saga since the start and you've actually been talking to some folks at Twitter. How is this all going down on the inside. Yeah, Well, when news broke the Elon Musk had sent Twitter a

letter saying he would perceive in the original terms. A number of very wide range of Twitter staff were in a three hour long quarterly strategic planning meeting and apparently in the first fifteen minutes, paragag Rol, the CEO of Twitter, was delivering some opening remarks, and pretty much for the entire duration of the three hour meeting, not a single word was said about the news that was breaking all around these employees. There was no sort of official comment.

We later in a memo that was shared to Bloomberg News or shared with Bloomberg News from Shaw and Edgett, whose general counsel. Eventually, once it was already in the public domain, employees were informed of what was going on. But you know, it's a very tough time right now if you're a Twitter employee, especially if you're working on the product, you really don't know where you stand. Reminders at what Musk has said about his vision for the platform.

We know he's concerned about barts and spam. We know he said he potentially would reinstate uh, former President Trump. You know what, what's our sense of what he'll do

once he potentially in a matter of days, owns Twitter. Yeah, I mean it's worth remembering as well what we learned in the text messages that came out as part of discovery through court filings, you know, and the whole reason for must take taking Twitter private largely comes from conversations with Jack Dawesy right that they need to enact changes that they felt couldn't be done if Twitter were republic entity, a public company, and a lot of that revolves around

the ad model, moving away from an ad model, you know, they want to tackle the box issue on the platform. Musk has also talked about, you know, paying for the privilege essentially a verification um, and finding new ways to monetize the platform beyond just relying on ads. And of course, you know, the big technological one for Muskar is open sourcing the algorithm that kind of drives the Twitter platform itself.

So those are the key areas that we think you'll focus on, But broadly, the kind of principle or ideological changes are this idea that he believes that it should be a place where freedom of speech is protected and that as long as that no one uses the Twitter platform to cause harm or offense, that a broad range of voices should be allowed onto it. And that seems to be Vlon Musk's philosophy. All right, I'd love They'll

thank you, of course for you're reporting throughout the day. Um, I want to take a look at this from a slightly different angle now, with the news of Elon Moscow greening to proceed with this Twitter deal, the idea of free speech on the internet of course back front and center. He has said that he would reverse former President Trump's permanent ban on Twitter that took place days after the

US capital attack. That attack had been in part fueled by Trumps Stop the Steel movement, a meme that became larger than life, with real world consequences. That's the subject of a new book, Meme Wars, The Untold Story of the online battles up ending Democracy in America, by researchers at Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Research director and co author of that book joined Joan Donovan is with us now for more. So, Joean a

lot to digest here. Elon Musk is a meme starter, one of the biggest meme tweeters in the world. He's the butt of a number of memes as well. What do you think him owning Twitter means for the platform? You know, when he first started making hay saying he was going to buy it, I thought it was going to be nonsensical. Um, now that he's invested in this is going to go through. One of the things that we looked at was, you know, what is Elon Musk

like to tweet? And he does tend to get right in the middle of very important worlds, historic geopolitical flame wars. UH just recently with Slinsky, for instance, about the war in Ukraine, and so UM he's he's not a politician, but he's very much a political figure, and he now has bought one of the most consequential communication technologies of our present day. And so we have to be on alert and very careful about UH charting these changes that

are going to come about. It Twitter very rapidly, and when he first started saying that he was going to buy the form of cross, UH many good employees left right away. And so I'm I'm afraid that the people who are there that are doing excellent work are not going to want to stay there because of the political

climate that their new boss brings. You make a very good point that just in the last twenty four hours he got right in the middle of a war between Russia and Ukraine, got a really heated response from Ukraine's President Zelinski himself. What are your biggest concerns about someone like Elon Musk owning this platform. UM And would you say concern is your overwhelming sentiment right now or are you also intrigued or potentially even a little bit excited

about the possibilities. Well, if you read the book mean More as it starts with the occupy movement, and Twitter is a key figure throughout the book as a place where people do launch mean mores and start and spark political movements, and where politicians have gotten their voice and their audience all the way up to where we end the book at the insurrection where events sitting president at the United States was able to use memes and hashtags in order to UH foment an insurrection With Elon Musk,

I imagine more than being concerned, I don't know the way in which he's going to come at questions of content moderation that are, you know, under the purview of UH what are obstensively called trust and safety teams. UM And particularly some of the tweets and memes that Elon has been sharing over the years do tend to run right up on the line of terms of service, whether they're transforment, transphobic, or homophobic or anti a woman, UM

or almost financial scams. He was also behind UH the early calls for people to take hydroxy chloroquine to cure coronavirus, and so everywhere we look and see his opinions floating around UM, we have to wonder to what degree is

he also spreading misinformation and disinformation on the platform. But business model wise, I can't imagine that this is gonna be big boon for Twitter over time, because if the quality of the information people have access to on this platform degrades much further than people are going to seek out UH similar technologies. Public trust is fairly low when you look at the surveys in social media are on

social media. Given your work covering and researching to stop the Steel movement, UM, what do you make of the timing of this UM and how Elon Musk could influence the moderation of content on the platform just weeks days before mid Jorm elections. It's a really good question because we don't know. What's interesting about bureaucracies in general is they're usually so big and inflexible that it would be hard for him to undo everything all at once, unless he were to say we're going to get rid of

the algorithms that remove hate speech. For instance. Uh, there are other algorithms that remove gore and pornography. Maybe they leave those in, but maybe they remove the filters that take out hate speech. UM. That could be really horrible for people who are using Twitter to look up information

about voting or information about civic participation. UM, and they're looking at it from the perspective of wanting to know if a candidate is black or Latino, and they yet then inundated with a bunch of hates, breech and slurs and insults, because that that stuff is the stuff of

content moderation. That's why UM, our Twitter feed isn't like a o L in the nineties, which was just um heinously full of stam and I think that, uh, based on the way he was talking about bots, I don't know if he really in depthely understands the way in which this platform has evolved over time, and that boughts

have been there since very early on on Twitter. And so the idea that you could get rid of bots, it's not just a question of figuring out what's automated, but also figuring out, well is that business that is using a bot that is totally legitimate Are they able to keep using bought in that way? So I think he's gonna I mean, unfortunately, I think he he bought a big bag of problems. Right, So last quick question, we're,

you know, weeks away from an election. How do you think the meme wars are going to pick up between now and then? Elon Musk aside, Well, Elon Musk is a voracious memer and he does tend to get a lot of his memes from from Reddit, so I have a feeling he'll be in the game. If Trump comes back, We're gonna see the the reanimation of Q and on Uh. It's already happening over on truth Social. I think the mean more to watch right now is between Dr Odds

and Fetterman. Uh. Fetterman has been coming out with a bunch of memes linking different things that Odds has done in his past too funny and quippy sayings and short videos. Odds too has been trying to uh make Fetterman uh or expose Fetterman for having some medical issues, and so that is ongoing. We are also seeing a mean moore develop around Dark Brandon. This idea that Joe Biden isn't what the insults have been saying all along, that he's

the senile old man. No, instead, he's this uh, hyper aware man would laser eyes that is organizing some kind of deep state takeover by having Trump's family charged. Um and of course what's going on in mar Lago, And as we watch these things play out, what we know that is underneath mean moors of course are um lies, disinformation. They're made to trick you. They're uh, they're made to

incite you. They're made to be confusing. But at the end of the day, because they function in the medics, they're also emotionally contagious, and so people do share them because it feels good. Uh. It's it's some dark and scary stuff that you've just walked us through there, uh And if you want to learn more about it, of course you could read jones book Memoirs. Joan Donovan, great to have you on the show. Thanks for helping us walk through this breaking news as well. You can check

out Jones book now. Okay, coming up, how Musks take over impacts the tech m and a landscape. That's next. This is Bloomberg, the revival of Elon Musk's planned to take Twitter private. I want to bring in Robert cant Well, now portfolio manager at the Hedge fund Upholdings. Uh, Robert, you don't hold Twitter, you don't hold Tesla. So just

to clarifying that at the start, what's your take? Well, our take is that Ellen, the whole negotiation was an option that didn't pay out, and it was a perfectly rational thing for him to pursue and put money into. And you know, folks are wondering how much money to lose on the lawyers, but you know, he had the opportunity to win billions back in a in a purchase price.

And clearly, as as the case wore on and as the text messages even began to leak, our suspicion is that his financial backers are not comfortable with that stuff being transparent. And so when he's facing you know, the potential loss of his co investors versus you know, having to pay a little bit more of a premium for the deal, I think it's become clear here that he was willing to take the deal at the higher price

without losing the backing of his partners. Well, and it's even more of a premium now that you know Twitter shares orders so much pressure after he pulled out of the deal. You know, do you think it's likely he's going to get the financing that he needs to do this banks, that the banks are going to be able to sell that well. The markets have been bouncing back a little bit. You've seen liquidity returning in little pieces. M and A has has frankly been the biggest driver

of the market. You had the Adobe acquisition of Figma that was a public over a private deal. You had Posh Mark acquired by an Asian business that's a public going private. Uh, now you've got Ellen now coming back to the Twitter deal, and there's a lot of this could be also framed around knowing that that price that he negotiated in April, the market had come down a

little bit. We hadn't reached the June lows yet, so there was a ninety day window there where he was trying to get a little bit cute around the price

that he was paying. But now that you're seeing the market recovering, now that you're hearing from other federal reserves around the world that they're starting to think about loosening how far they're going to go on interest rates, you're starting to see equity multiples come back, and that also could have been a consideration where if if you really did still want Twitter in his heart of hearts, he might have had to pay even more for a year

from now. So as market prices are improving, that also made the deal financially more attractive at where he had agreed to previously. And there's still a very long path from here until the deal closing, but it certainly seems as likely as it's ever been now right, it's not over till it's over and then over again. You do own a number of you do have a huge tech portfolio,

including you know, social media advertising revenue based companies. How do you think this impacts the advertising revenue stream for Twitter? I mean, advertisers have been you know, understandably spooked over the last few months um whether or not they should be back, you know, putting their money into Twitter at

all anymore. So for context, Twitter they've got about five and a half billion dollars of revenue, Snapchat about four and a half, met about a hundred and twenty so for orders of magnitude that we're talking here, Twitter is still a relatively small player. But the thing that's different about Twitter relative to a snapchet. Twitter is a top five global web property, so when you talk about the reach, and if you look at the top thirty web properties

in the world, they're basically owned by Googler Meta. So Twitter was the last remaining independent top ten worldwide internet property, and that's got to be the one thing that they're in their heart of hearts telling themselves, this is why this thing is worth forty four billion dollars, because there's a lot more ways that we're gonna be able to extract value from it beyond just advertising. So advertising is likely to look reasonably healthy in the fourth quarter. You've

got the mid terms coming up in a month. Political quarters are always pretty good for digital advertisers, and they also may have heard that Twitter's numbers were improving and must wanted to get ahead of that as well. So that's what we're mainly looking out for, is the digital digital advertiser performance in the fourth quarter of this year. All right, Robert kentwell, upholding portfolio manager. Good to have you hear you on this. Thank you so much for stopping.

Now wrap it all up. I want to bring in our own Sarah Fryar or Bloomberg Tech editor to cap this crazy day and talk about what this means for the future. Sarah, A lot of huge existential questions here. Let's say Elon Musk does buy Twitter, it's a done deal. How do you imagine, as someone who has covered social media for the better part of a decade, how do

you think he'll change Twitter and social media? I think he's very quickly going to find out that a lot of the things that he wanted to do to change it, um, such as you know, these broad notions, notions of advocating for free speech, are a lot easier said than done. UM. I think that he, as we've seen in his text messages, gets a lot of feedback from very powerful people around

the world and sometimes acts on it. And so I think he's going to be UM really grappling with that and trying to figure out what principles to push for and and what is worth ignoring. I wonder if Twitter will be under even more scrutiny also with Musk as a sole owner, you know, I think about the scrutiny that Mark Zuckerberg has gotten at Facebook, will the pressure to be even higher? The pressure might be higher, but we're not going to get as much information. It's gonna

be more of a black box. I think that as a private company, Twitter is much less likely to tell us how it's growing or or how its business is doing, and UM Elon Musk will be the main source of information, So it's going to be even more critical for journalists like us to really find out what's happening behind the scenes. UM I. I do think that there are going to be a lot of disgruntled employees, people who already tell us that they're they're not looking forward to UM leadership

under Musk for whatever reason. UM, and I think that it's going to be a big cultural change for the company, especially UM in in issues as simple as as work from home. As Elon Musk has said that he's not he's not a big supporter of that quickly. Are you expecting an exodus of employees or you know, also potentially and in flux definitely both right. I think that we're going to see people who are are huge fans of Elon Musk and what he's accomplished elsewhere UM say that

they'd love to work for him in Twitter. I think we're also going to see employees who disagree with with him UM try to find other employment. But that's that It is a tough time. There are hiring freezes across the board of tech companies UM companies that are cutting their budgets. So if you are a Twitter employee who's trying to get out of there, you probably already tried to UM to start your search. I think that a lot of employees are are sort of figuring that out

right now, and we're a little uncertain. I think there's still some uncertainty about whether this is going to actually happen. All right, Sarah, thank you for giving us a little view into your version of the crystal Ball, Big hard Questions at hand, Bloomberg, Sarah Fryar, thank you. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. We're gonna be across all developments on this tomorrow, of course. And also, Francis Howgan is joining us the Facebook whistle blower, one

year after her historic testimony before Congress. I'm sure she has some thoughts on Elon Musk owning Twitter as well. I'm Emily Chang in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg