Apollo Global Management Inc is interested in helping finance a bid for Twitter Inc following Elon Musk’s US$43 billion unsolicited offer to take the company private, people familiar with the matter said.
Apollo is considering backing a potential deal for Twitter and could provide Musk or another bidder, such as private-equity firm Thoma Bravo LP, with equity or debt to support an offer, the people said, declining to be named because the discussions are private.
The participation could come in the form of credit or preferred equity, one of the people said.
Photo: Reuters
POISON PILL
Twitter shares posted their biggest gain in two weeks on Monday after the social media company launched a poison pill defense to thwart the Tesla Inc chief executive’s bid to take the company private at US$54.20 a share.
A securities filing on Monday confirmed the defense strategy Twitter outlined last week, which would allow the company to issue new stock that all shareholders except Musk could buy at a discounted price.
It imposes a “significant penalty” on any person or entity that would acquire more than 15 percent of the company without board approval, the filing said.
Musk owns just over 9 percent of Twitter shares.
“The board adopted the rights agreement to protect stockholders from coercive or otherwise unfair takeover tactics,” the filing said.
The stock rose 7.5 percent to US$48.45 in New York, its biggest jump since April 4.
Twitter has been fielding takeover interest from other parties, including technology-focused private equity firm Thoma Bravo, a person familiar with the matter said.
Private equity firm Silver Lake, which already owns a significant stake in Twitter, would also make sense as a partner as it has an existing relationship with Musk, but it is unclear if it is interested.
ORACLE
Meanwhile, Musk might partner with Oracle Corp and a private equity consortium that includes Thoma Bravo to thwart Twitter’s poison pill, “while raising the bid 10 to 15 percent to about US$50 billion,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts said.
Musk, for his part, has said that any rejection of his bid would cause him to re-evaluate his stake. Over the weekend, Musk said that the economic interests of Twitter’s board are not aligned with shareholders.
He was responding to a tweet about board members’ stock holdings, saying that with the impending departure of cofounder Jack Dorsey, the board “collectively owns almost no shares.”
In a Twitter post on Monday, Musk said that if his Twitter bid succeeds, board members would not be given a salary.
Tesla has paid its own directors an annual cash retainer of about US$20,000 plus certain additional fees in recent years, but they also each receive stock option grants every few years — meaning they stand to make tens of millions of dollars or more with Tesla’s stock price gains.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS