Elon Musk Buys Twitter! In a wild turn of events, Twitter announced that they have agreed to terms with tech Juggernaut, Elon Musk, to buy Twitter. The deal was made on Monday, Apr 25th 2022, for roughly 44 billion dollars.
Bret Taylor, Twitter independent board chair stated “The Twitter Board conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon’s proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty, and financing.”
Elon has been interested in Twitter
It is no secret that Elon has been interested in Twitter for awhile. Elon bought about 9.2% share of Twitter in early April 2022 and almost immediately began talks to buy the entire platform outright.
Late last week he announced that he was able to secure the funding for around $ 46 billion in hopes to be able to purchase the platform. During this time, he has openly expressed his interest in opening the platform to be as free as possible.
Elon Musk Buys Twitter
Confirmed this morning, Elon has purchased Twitter in order to make it private. The total purchase price falling just around $44 billion.
The board of any company has a duty to his shareholders to make the most ideal decisions in their best interest. Due to the profit that every shareholder would stand to receive as a result of this purchase, it put the board in a tough position where the only answer could be to sell.
It can’t be known with any certainty what Musk plans to do with Twitter now that he owns it. But we do know that he has expressed a lot of interest in making the platform more free.
Elon made the statement a few weeks ago “I think it’s very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech, Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have the, both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”
“I think it’s very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech, Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have the, both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”
Elon Musk
Not everyone is excited
The former Facebook public policy director and CEO of consultancy Anchor Change, Katie Harbath, in a comment about Elon stated “What Musk seemingly fails to recognize is that to truly have free speech today, you need moderation. Otherwise, just those who bully and harass will be left as they will drive others away.”
However, it would seem that in Twitters attempt to curb the bullying, many people have been banned or shadow banned for simply having controversial ideas. For example, expressing the “wrong” opinion about recent medical events might have gotten you banned, even if these opinions turned out to be true later on.
It’s widely debated as to whether or not the best approach is to have an open forum or a moderated one. But for Twitter, based on all available data, might begin to become more open with Elon Musk at the helm.
