Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter overcame another hurdle on Friday after the social media company said a regulatory waiting period that required an antitrust review had ended.
The 30-day review period, during which the Federal Trade Commission and the US Justice Department’s antitrust department were tasked with looking into the deal, came and went on Friday, Twitter announced.
The development comes after Musk said last month that the Twitter deal was “temporarily on hold,” while he asked for more details about the proportion of fake accounts on the platform.
Musk has secured funding for the deal, which includes $33.5 billion through equity financing and $13 billion through loans against Twitter.
The Tesla CEO is under scrutiny over the time of his initial disclosure in April, when he announced that he had bought a 9.2% stake in the social media company.
Musk announced in April that the acquisition deal would be “on hold” pending a review of the site’s policies as it deals with bots and spam accounts.
Reuters
Earlier on Friday, it was revealed by email that Musk has a “super bad feeling” about the state of the US economy. According to Reuters, he is also planning to lay off some 10% of Tesla’s employees.
It’s not clear how Tesla’s layoffs will affect its acquisition of Twitter. Shares of Twitter were up about 0.33% as of 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday.
Tesla stock fell more than 8.5% compared to the same time on Friday.
Musk had earlier said he is worried about the economy and there is the need to cut about 10 percent of jobs at Tesla; the electric carmaker.
Tesla shares fell nearly 3 percent in US premarket trade on Friday and the Frankfurt-listed stock was down 3.6 percent after a Reuters report. US Nasdaq futures turned negative and traded lower by 0.6 percent.
In late May, when asked by a Twitter user if the economy was approaching a recession, Musk said: “Yeah, but it’s actually a good thing. Money has been raining on fools for a long time.” Something needs to go bankrupt.”
