With Elon Musk pushing forward with his planned acquisition of Twitter (TWTR), billionaire Carl Icahn could make up to $250 million.
In fact, the Musk-Twitter deal could be finalized as early as Friday, depending on financing, says The Wall Street Journal. “Icahn quietly amassed a Twitter stake of well over $500 million in the past few months and made a sizable profit Tuesday after the shares shot up on news that Mr. Musk offered to close his $44 billion purchase of the social-media giant on the original terms, according to people familiar with the matter.”
You see, Icahn made an arbitrage bet that the acquisition would proceed as initially planned. Reportedly, Icahn also saw the purchase of TWTR as a can’t lose situation. From here, Icahn stands to become $250 million richer.
As for Twitter, the deal should be completed shortly, and taken private.
As noted in a 2022 press release:
Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.
And, as noted by Elon Musk at the time in the same press release:
“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,” said Mr. Musk. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, 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.”
Shares of Twitter last traded at $50.51 on a volume spike to 39.6 million shares, as compared to its daily average volume of 15.79 million.