Elon Musk, struck a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, capping a saga complete with hostile takeover threats before delivering him personal control of Twitter. It is one of the world’s biggest deals in the tech world, billionaire Elon Musk has taken control of Twitter.
The publicly traded firm will now become a private company owned by Musk, who negotiated a purchase price of $54.20 per-share. The deal comes just four days after Musk unveiled a financing package to back the acquisition. 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.
According to Musk, the social media company needs to go private because it can “neither thrive nor serve” free speech in its current state.” Musk said in a statement released by Twitter.”I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans.
At the same time, like other platforms, Twitter’s community standards restrict legally protected speech in a way that disproportionately affects frequently silenced speakers. And also like other platforms, Twitter routinely removes content that does not violate its standards, including sexual expression, counterspeech, and certain political speech.
The Tesla CEO has previously criticized the social media giant publicly, polling people on Twitter last month about whether the company abides by free speech principles. He also said he was considering building a new social media platform.
Earlier Musk had posted on his Twitter account, “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.” It should also be noted that on Saturday, Musk had posted a rather distasteful tweet about Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, apparently in response to Gates shorting Tesla. The tweet has more than a million likes. He had then joked that the ‘shadow ban council’ was likely reviewing his tweet.
