Elon Musk acquires Twitter after board accepts buyout offer
The Twitter board Monday voted to accept a takeover offer from Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a deal at $44 billion.
Musk took to the social media platform, tweeting out "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means."
The deal took the San Francisco-based company private, purchasing shares at about $54.20 a share.
In a news release, Musk said his goal in acquiring Twitter was to make it better.
"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," Musk said. "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. Twitter has tremendous potential - I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."
Before the opening bell Monday, shares of Twitter Inc. rose 5% with trading halted at the time of the announcement.
Twitter had enacted an anti-takeover measure known as a poison pill that could make a takeover attempt prohibitively expensive. But the board decided to negotiate after Musk updated his proposal to show he had secured financing, according to The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the negotiations were underway.
On April 14, Musk announced an offer to buy the social media platform for $54.20 per share, or about $43 billion, but did not say at the time how he would finance the acquisition.
Last week, he said in documents filed with U.S. securities regulators that the money would come from Morgan Stanley and other banks, some of it secured by his huge stake in the electric car maker.
Musk has said he wants to buy Twitter because he doesn't feel it's living up to its potential as a platform for free speech.
In recent weeks, he has voiced a number of proposed changes for the company, from relaxing its content restrictions - such as the rules that suspended former President Donald Trump's account - to ridding the platform of its problems with fake and automated accounts.
Musk's potential move to lift the curtain on the inner workings of Twitter is a source of curiosity for tech experts.
"He wants to change the algorithm—that computer program that picks the top tweets—he wants to make that public. Something that is a very closely guarded secret by Facebook, and Youtube and all these companies," said Ian Sherr, Editor at Large for CNET.
Considerable debate rages on about Musk's philosophy of reimagining Twitter as a hub for what he describes as "free speech."
Ann Skeet, Santa Clara University's Senior Director of Leadership Ethics says Musk's move to deregulate speech on the platform and his move to acquire Twitter itself poses two main ethical challenges.
"One issue is the concentration of power in the hands of wealthy people, which is very counter to democratic ideals and principles, and the other is the lack of means of holding people responsible for their words and actions on social media platforms," Skeet said.
Musk is the world's wealthiest person, according to Forbes, with a nearly $279 billion fortune. But much of his money is tied up in Tesla stock - he owns about 17% of the company, according to FactSet, which is valued at more than $1 trillion - and SpaceX, his privately held space company. It's unclear how much cash Musk has.