Elon Musk Buys Twitter to “Protect Free Speech”

Posted On 25 Apr 2022

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Twitter is ready to agree to Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company, Reuters reported on Monday

Multiple outlets have reported that Musk is in talks with Twitter’s board of directors to finalize his buyout of the company. Musk and the board members met for negotiations on Sunday, with several outstanding issues remaining to be settled, people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

A deal could be finalized as soon as Monday, according to Bloomberg and the New York Times.

Musk made an offer to buy Twitter earlier this month shortly after buying a roughly 9 percent stake in the social media company, becoming its largest shareholder. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO polled his 80 million followers in March on whether Twitter upheld principles of free speech.

Worth $259 billion, Musk is currently the richest man in the world.

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk wrote in an SEC filing. “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”

It is unclear whether Musk’s buyout of Twitter will be completed. However, the Sunday report marked an apparent turnaround after previous indications that Twitter would decline Musk’s offer.

On April 14 Musk bid to buy Twitter at $54.20 a share, a 54 percent premium over the share price the day before he began investing in early January, or about $43 billion for the whole company, but did not outline how he would provide funding. However, Musk announced a week later that he partnered with Morgan Stanley to finance a buyout. Musk said he would provide $21 billion in equity in his name, with another $25 billion in debt.

Musk is not backing down from his offer of $54.20 per share, according to the Journal.

Musk called for a more transparent operation at Twitter during a talk with TED leader Chris Anderson earlier this month.

“Having tweets be mysteriously promoted and demoted, with no insight into what’s going on; having a black box algorithm promote some things and not other things; I think this can be quite dangerous,” Musk said.

“It won’t be perfect, but I think we want to really have…the perception and the reality that speech is as free as reasonably possible,” Musk added later in the talk. “And a good sign as to whether there is free speech is, is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like. And if that is the case, then we have free speech.”

Musk’s bid to take over Twitter comes after various controversies involving the company’s censorship policies.

Prior to the 2020 presidential election, Twitter blocked the New York Post‘s account for posting a story on emails by Hunter Biden allegedly obtained from his laptop. Twitter cited its “hacked materials policy” at the time, which prohibited posting of “content obtained through hacking that contains private information, may put people in physical harm or danger, or contains trade secrets.” Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey later admitted that the move was a “mistake.“