{"id":744,"date":"2022-04-30T06:59:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-30T06:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/?p=744"},"modified":"2022-05-08T20:02:40","modified_gmt":"2022-05-08T20:02:40","slug":"musk-buys-twitter-44-billion-takes-company-private-digital-town-square","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/musk-buys-twitter-44-billion-takes-company-private-digital-town-square\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk buys Twitter in historical $44 billion deal, takes company private, plans to make algorithms open source for the “digital town square”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\nSAN FRANCISCO, April 25, 2022 \/PRNewswire\/ — Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk,<\/a> for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.

\n\nTwitter has accepted Elon Musk\u2019s offer to purchase the company for $44 billion, the company announced in a press release today.<\/a> Musk purchased the company at $54.20 a share, the same price named in his initial offer on April 14th.

\n\n\u201cFree 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,\u201d said Musk in a statement included with the release. \u201cI 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.\u201d

\n\nMusk laid out his plan for funding the deal in an SEC filing on Thursday, which includes $25.5 billion in loans and $21 billion in personal equity. Analysts believe the loans could cost Twitter as much as $1 billion a year in servicing fees, or roughly 20 percent of the company\u2019s annual revenue.

\n\nMusk has been outspoken in his criticism of Twitter moderation, describing himself as a \u201cfree speech absolutist\u201d and raising concerns over how the platform would moderate under his control. \u201cIt\u2019s just really important that people have the reality and the perception that they\u2019re able to speak freely within the bounds of the law,\u201d Musk said in an interview with Chris Anderson during TED 2022. \u201cI think broadly, the civilizational risk is decreased the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform.\u201d

\n\nMusk originally offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share on April 14th. The offer followed Musk\u2019s disclosure of acquiring a 9.2 percent stake, a move that made him Twitter\u2019s largest individual shareholder at the time. At one time Musk was offered a seat on the company\u2019s board of directors but the deal soon fell apart, as a seat on the board would prevent him from buying more than a 14.9 percent stake in Twitter.

\n\nTwitter\u2019s board has accepted an offer from billionaire Elon Musk to buy the social media company and take it private, the company announced Monday.<\/a> The announcement ends a weekslong saga Musk kicked off when he offered to buy the company at $54.20 per share, his \u201cbest and final.\u201d The stock closed up 5.64% for the day after it was halted for the news. “Twitter has tremendous potential \u2014 I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.” Musk said in a statement included in the press release announcing the $44 billion deal.

\n\nThe deal, which was unanimously approved by Twitter\u2019s board, is expected to close this year.<\/a> It comes after Musk revealed last week he had lined up $46.5 billion in financing to acquire the company, an apparent turning point that forced Twitter\u2019s board to seriously consider the deal. The board met Sunday to evaluate Musk\u2019s offer. Twitter stock was up nearly 6% following the announcement of the deal, hovering around $51.84, just shy of the offer price. The deal is pending approval from shareholders and regulators.

\n\nTwitter shares closed Monday at $51.70, up 5.7% for the day, so Musk is buying the company for more than market value.<\/a> But he says the economics of the purchase are not what’s important. Musk believes the point of the purchase is to further the cause of free speech.

\n\nElon Musk says he doesn’t own a house and for the most part sleeps in friends’ spare bedrooms<\/a>
\nElon Musk \u2013 the richest person in the world \u2013 says he doesn’t own his own house right now. The Tesla and SpaceX mogul has in the past said he does not own the mega mansion you’d expect. Instead, he couch surfs, he said in a recent interview with with TED’s Chris Anderson.

\n\n“I don’t even own a place right now, I’m literally staying at friends’ places,” Musk said during the interview, shared on TED’s YouTube on Sunday. “If I travel to the Bay Area, which is where most of Tesla’s engineering is, I basically rotate through friends’ spare bedrooms.”

\n\nMusk, a father of seven, has an estimated net worth of $270.1 billion, according to Forbes. Still, Grimes \u2013 the mother of two of his children \u2013 admitted during a recent Vanity Fair interview they lived in a “very insecure $40,000 house.” The singer dug further into Musk’s money matters, saying at one point he had a mattress with a hole in it and didn’t want to buy a new one.

\n\nShe said their house had “no security” and that she ate “peanut butter for eight days in a row.” During this interview, Grimes revealed she and Musk welcomed their second baby \u2013 secretly \u2013 and that although it was reported they had broken up, that wasn’t entirely true. They’re “fluid” and live in separate houses, she said.

\n\nIt is unclear where Grimes lives now, but during his TED interview, Musk said where he lives is generally at other people’s houses. Musk dropped this detail when answering a question about the wealth disparity in the U.S. between average Americans and billionaires like himself. “For sure, it would be very problematic if I was spending billions of dollars a year in personal consumption, but that is not the case,” he said. “It’s not as though my personal consumption is high,” he continued, admitting there is one exception: his private plane. “But if I don’t use the plane then I have less hours to work,” he said. Musk’s claims of a minimalistic lifestyle go even further back. In May 2020 he tweeted: “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.”

\n\n(unquote)

\n\nImage courtesy Dave Smith \/ Business Insider<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(quote) SAN FRANCISCO, April 25, 2022 \/PRNewswire\/ — Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion ofRead More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,8,10,11,12],"tags":[21,36,26,27,40,18,58,35,52,41,32],"class_list":["entry","author-wcp-tomorrows-history","post-744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-figures-and-facts","category-health-and-lifestyle","category-life-nature-society","category-quotes-and-philosophy","category-science-and-technology","category-us-and-world","tag-business","tag-events","tag-facts","tag-figures","tag-internet","tag-life","tag-lifestyle","tag-news","tag-people","tag-society","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldculturepictorial.com\/wcp-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}