Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter for the original price proposed earlier this year, a move that could defuse a courtroom showdown over the ownership of the social media giant.
As Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (Oct. 4), the world’s richest man made the $54.20 per share offer in a letter to Twitter, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.
Musk was not immediately available for comment Tuesday.
A Twitter spokesperson provided PYMNTS with a statement, saying: “We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC. The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share.”
See more: Elon Musk Scraps $44B Deal to Buy Twitter
Musk had first proposed buying Twitter in the spring in a deal that valued the company at $44 billion. The Space X and Tesla CEO has more than 83 million followers on the platform, where he shares his thoughts on everything from space travel to cryptocurrency to — as of this week — ending the Russia/Ukraine conflict.
He also became Twitter’s single biggest individual investor earlier this year, with a 9% stake. In the weeks after announcing the purchase, Musk proposed a number of significant changes to Twitter, such as taking the company private and integrating digital payments.
Read more: Musk: ‘Integrate Payments Into Twitter’
Musk said during a meeting in June that money is “fundamentally digital at this point and has been for a while.”
“It would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter so it’s easy to send money back and forth,” he said
But weeks after the deal was announced, Musk put it on hold before officially ending the agreement in July, claiming Twitter breached multiple aspects of the merger agreement, including questions about the number and influence of spam bots.
Learn more: Twitter Insists Spam Accounts Represent Fewer Than 5% of Members
Twitter sued Musk to force him to carry out the deal. A trial is scheduled for Oct. 17 in Chancery Court in Delaware.
Twitter has maintained that spam accounts make up less than 5% of its membership, a claim the company restated in August in a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), responding to a commission request for more information on how it arrived at its spam numbers.
“Twitter believes that it already adequately discloses the methodology that it uses in calculating these figures,” the company said in the letter.
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