Elon Musk acquires Twitter for $44 billion

The chaotic businessman everyone loves to hate actually pulls it off, what happens next is anyone’s guess

It’s been a rollercoaster of a month at Twitter HQ, that much is certain, but the world’s most influential social platform now officially belongs to Tesla’s and SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk. (Image: Brett Jordan, Unsplash)

After more than a month of what now seems like a risky chess game or a negotiation as unpredictable and chaotic as this man’s mind — as per usual, one can’t easily tell which was which — Elon Musk is buying Twitter for $44 billion. The company’s board met during the weekend to reconsider Musk’s offer (it had initially instituted a “poison pill” measure in order to block a hostile takeover) after the entrepreneur made his plan on funding the deal public on Thursday.

Musk offered $54.20 per share, the same price discussed when he initially proposed to buy Twitter back on April 15th, which is higher but not that much higher than the company’s stock closing stock price on Friday — suggesting that shareholders did not really believe that Twitter’s board would accept Musk’s deal after all. What happened between Friday afternoon and Monday morning is not clear (chances are we will never know) but the board managed to agree with Musk on the details of the deal in time for Twitter’s earnings report for the quarter. A clearer message of the service “turning a page” through this buyout no Twitter shareholder could have asked for.

Elon Musk has already claimed that buying Twitter “is not about the money”, which obviously begs the question in everyone’s mind: what is it about, then? (Image: Steve Jurvetson, Flickr)

What’s in everyone’s mind, of course, is the obvious question: what happens next? Elon Musk’s official response consists of sentences we have all read before… as tweets: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”. “I want to make Twitter better than ever”, Musk claims, “by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans”. “Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it”, Musk concluded.

Regardless of what Twitter’s new owner really plans to do with the service, he definitely has his work cut out for him. It will be difficult, for example, to add…