Real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran didn’t mince words when asked about Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk’s recent behavior.
“I’d like to zip him in a Ziploc bag and try to get his ego stuffed inside and calm him down,” the “Shark Tank” investor told Yahoo Finance in an interview (video above). “He’s a bit much lately. I liked him better who he was than who he is lately.”
Musk offered to buy Twitter (TWTR) for nearly $44 billion, or $54.20 per share, on April 14. The social media platform agreed to a deal on April 25th.
But on May 13, the world’s richest man on paper claimed the deal was “on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.” A few days later, Musk responded to a tweet thread from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal with a poop emoji.
Twitter stock lost nearly all gains since the company disclosed Musk’s initial 9.2% stake in the company on April 4, and Tesla stock also sunk more than the broader market recently.
Late Wednesday night, Twitter investors — led by Virginia resident William Heresniak — filed a lawsuit against him, alleging the billionaire executive engaged “in conduct designed to create doubt about the deal and drive Twitter’s stock down substantially in order to create leverage.”
“Twitter has lost $8 billion in valuation since the buyout was announced,” the suit alleges.
The suit also claims Musk failed to timely disclose his stake in the company under SEC law, and thus “bought Twitter stock at an artificially low price.”
The lawsuit comes as a new SEC filing revealed Musk is planning to front $33.5 billion of his own wealth to take over the social media company, although many observers aren’t convinced the deal will be completed at the initial $44 billion bid, if at all.
Twitter’s Agrawal suggested the deal was still moving forward at the company’s annual shareholder meeting Wednesday, saying: “We are working through the transaction process.”
Corcoran previously sung the praises of Musk during a January 2020 interview with Yahoo Finance, describing him as a “winner.”
Musk is “rough, but let me tell you, any great leader is rough,” she said at the time. “Any great leader has a strong opinion and isn’t so smooth on the edges and drives it home. … But that’s what you want when you want to reinvent a category, and that’s what he’s done.”
In the latest interview, Corcoran joked that “I’m hoping he gets simmered down — he needs a good woman and put him in his place.”
Alexandra is a Senior Entertainment and Food Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @alliecanal8193 or email her at alexandra.canal@yahoofinance.com
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Source: finance.yahoo.com