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After months of back-and-forth disputes, Elon Musk officially acquired the social media company Twitter on October 27, 2022. Musk is the founder of SpaceX and Tesla. He is currently said to be the richest human in the world, with a net worth of $241 billion.
He started the quest to purchase the company in April of 2022 when he purchased just over 9% of the company, which cost approximately $2.9 billion dollars. This is an unfathomable amount to some, but to the business mogul – it was apparently worth it.
He was quoted saying that he wanted to purchase Twitter for humanitarian reasons. There have been months of intense debate over whether the transaction would ever be finalized. Rumors and lawsuits abounded. To the shock of many, Musk closed the deal in October for $44 billion.
On Tuesday, after the deal was complete, Musk said,
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”
Musk included this in a note to advertisers. His intent seemed to be to convince them, and everyone watching, that he was making this purchase for the good of all people. He was an avid user of the platform before the purchase, with critics saying that Musk used his power, fortune, and platform in order to manipulate markets and cause general chaos.
Musk took the company private after the acquisition and immediately started making big changes to the management. The board of directors was dissolved the same day that Musk acquired the company. Notably, Twitter’s former CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and chairman Bret Taylor were terminated, along with many others. With the entire board gone and many workers fearing for their positions within the company, Musk is officially the sole director of Twitter. Musk said this move was in order to reduce costs for the platform, as well as an attempt to make it marketable after the costly acquisition. Some speculators have said that the decision to upend many employees was in order to avoid payouts that were due to go out on November 1st of this year.
Was Musk’s Twitter takeover actually for humanitarian reasons and to support “free speech?” Was it a power grab and attempt for an unchecked platform? Or, was it just an impulse purchase by someone with plenty of money to do so?
There have been many arguments for all sides of this topic with debates becoming heated across social channels and news outlets. One thing is for sure, the closing of this sale has everyone talking about Elon Musk. As changes roll out, and new information becomes available, I suspect the reasons behind the deal will become clear. For now, we will have to wait and see.
