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I don't get how the logistics work in a move like this. If you're a shareholder and the board approves the sale are you forced to sell your shares to Elon at the stated price? What if you don't want to sell?

Edit: I also wonder how leveraged positions, especially shorts, get resolved.



Yes. Specifically, your shares will just turn into cash in your brokerage account. You don't need to initiate a sale.

Note that this happens even if you're going to lose money on your investment.


What happens to shorts? Does "debt of 1 share" just turn into "debt of cash value"?


Shorts are forced to cover so they have to go out in the market and buy. So effectively they lose their money.

I made a video about some possible outcomes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYFqQ6yk9vs


The sale can be forced so long as 75% of shareholders approve and the purchase price is above the sale price during the offer period.

No idea about shorts. I would assume that the short seller would simply have to pay the original owner the end purchase price.


Depends on the shareholder agreement and how the board fits into that.

By default it would be something like - if the board approved it goes to a shareholder vote, and if 75% or 90% of the shareholders approve the rest are dragged.

I doubt the board can force all shareholders to sell, that would be an insane power position for shareholders


This is informative, thank you. I wonder what portion of Twitter investors are index fund companies like like Vanguard and "institutional investors" like pension funds that are unlikely to object. And obviously Elon himself is a ~10% shareholder. Seems likely that this would pass a vote easily.


78.4%

search "Inst Own" https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=TWTR

That's actually crazy to think about... so besides Elon, only 11.6% of shares are privately held? Meaning Elon holds about half of all privately held shares? Unless somehow he is in the 78.4% but I don't think so.


He might be in both brackets - 11.6% of shares held privately plus some fraction of that 78.4% by owning some broad index funds.




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