Elon Musk Aside, Is Twitter a Buy Today?

Elon Musk -- who has been notoriously controversial on social media -- bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) in early April, making him the company's largest shareholder. Needless to say, the news of Musk's purchase sent Twitter's stock skyrocketing, with shares of the popular social media firm soaring above 20% early in the day. A stake less than 10% is considered passive, but many investors are convinced that Musk plans to change the landscape of the company's operations in one way or another. After all, the Tesla CEO has been a longtime critic of Twitter and has even gone as far as to claim he was considering building his own social media platform.

To take it one step further, Musk offered to buy Twitter for $41.4 billion on April 14th. The bid values the social media company at $54.20/share, equal to a 38% premium over Twitter's closing price on April 1st. Even after receiving a nice boost from the recent news, Twitter shares are still down 35% this past year compared to the S&P 500, which is up 8%. The Elon Musk headlines are exciting, but they shouldn't be the reason you decide to invest in Twitter today. On that note, let's examine the company in more detail to help us determine if it's worth our capital moving forward.

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Source Fool.com