Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for second time

Twitter has confirmed that Elon Musk has offered to buy the company for a second time this year.

The website said in a statement that it plans to agree to the offer at 54.20 dollars (£47.23) per share, the same price Mr Musk previously put forward.

The total value of the deal would be 44 billion dollars (£38.3 billion).

A spokesperson for Twitter said: “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 dollars per share.”

Twitter’s stock surged 22.2% to 52 dollars (£45.31) after the announcement.

Earlier this year, the SpaceX founder offered to purchase the company but pulled out in July.

Lawyers for Mr Musk said it was due to the platform “not complying with its contractual obligations” surrounding the deal, namely giving him enough information to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform”.

Twitter said in response it was “committed to closing the transaction” and launched legal action. Mr Musk later countersued.

A month later, in a published court document, Twitter accused Mr Musk of “looking for an excuse” to get out of the deal, with the firm calling Mr Musk’s accusations “factually inaccurate, legally insufficient, and commercially irrelevant”.

The two sides have continued to tussle in the lead-up to the trial of the stalled takeover, which was due to heard by judges in the US later this month.

In late August, a former company executive at Twitter turned whistleblower, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, accused the microblogging website of having substantial security problems that place personal user data and potentially national security at risk.

In response, Twitter disputed Mr Zatko’s account, adding that there was a “false narrative about Twitter and our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies”.

The company added that he had been sacked in January for “ineffective leadership and poor performance.”