In a tweet heard ‘round the cable universe, CNBC’s David Faber on Wednesday night said that multiple sources have told him that Comcast is preparing to make a formal overture to take full control of Time Warner Cable. According to Faber, Comcast on Thursday will announce it has offered Time Warner Cable a buyout of $159 per share, in what he characterized as an all-stock deal. The co-host of CNBC’s Squawk on the Street subsequently informed his 55,000+ Twitter followers that Comcast is willing to divest 3 million subscribers to satisfy any regularity issues that might sour the deal. He also noted that while the “Comcast deal…does not face ownership cap restrictions,” it is “sure to get [a] tough review” from the Federal Communications Commission. If all comes to pass as Faber has foretold, the Comcast-TWC deal would end months of speculation about Charter Communications’ desire to snap up the nation’s second-largest cable operator. It would also create a supercolossus; Comcast closed out 2013 with 21.7 million video subscribers, while TWC serves 11.2 million TV subs. It should not come as a tremendous surprise that Faber may well have the inside track on a Comcast-TWC deal; after all, the cable giant is the parent company of CNBC. Charter in January offered to acquire TWC for $132.50 a share, although board members were said to be willing to bump the price up by a factor of $10 a pop. That still wasn’t nearly satisfactory to the subject of the takeover bid, which was angling for $160 per share. One of the rumors flying around at the time had Comcast lending its support in exchange for TWC’s metropolitan New York operations, as well as systems in Portland, Maine, and select DMAs in North Carolina. Given that TWC has just shy of 280 million shares outstanding, the back-of-the-napkin map puts the value of the hypothetical transaction at a princely $44.5 billion. Comcast has a market cap of $146.5 billion.