Musk Buys Twitter
Twitter has reportedly accepted billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to completely buy the company.
Earlier in the month, the tech CEO made a big purchase of stock that gave him the largest individual share of the company, and flirted with joining Twitter’s Board, but was rebuffed by efforts from the board.
A previous deal for Elon to purchase Twitter was similarly kiboshed by the Board when they instituted a “poison pill” measure to keep Musk from buying the company by allowing certain shareholders to buy more stocks quickly, keeping someone like Musk from purchasing the company without Board dealings.
Not to be outdone, Musk pulled together some assets and made an offer to buy the company outright, which the Board agreed to.
For $54.20 a share, Musk has purchased the popular social media company for a reported $44 billion. For some context, the initial investment SpaceX put up for developing Starbase was just $100 million; not even close to the Twitter buyout. That’s a pricey company.
Musk has been a loud critic of Twitter’s moderation, saying in an interview that he believes free speech is incredibly important on widely used platforms like Twitter.
“It’s just really important that people have the reality and the perception that they’re able to speak freely within the bounds of the law, [...] I think broadly, the civilizational risk is decreased the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform.”
What that means for Twitter’s current policy of combating misinformation is unknown, but with Musk now at the helm we can definitely expect some structural changes to the app.