On Monday, 25 April 2022, Twitter's board agreed to sell the company to Elon Musk for about $44 billion, or $54.20 a share, and the world's richest man marked the moment the only way he knows: a tweet reading "Yes" with a heart. Three weeks earlier he had merely been its largest shareholder. Now the man with 84 million followers owns the platform he uses most.
How it happened in three weeks
- 4 April: Musk discloses a 9.2 per cent stake, bought quietly since January. Twitter offers him a board seat.
- 10 April: He turns the seat down; a director cannot own more than 15 per cent.
- 14 April: He offers to buy the whole company for $54.20 a share, "my best and final offer", telling chairman Bret Taylor he has "no confidence in management". The board responds with a "poison pill" to block him.
- 21 April: He shows $46.5 billion in financing, including loans against his Tesla shares.
- 25 April: The board accepts. Twitter shares close at $51.70; chief executive Parag Agrawal tells staff the company's future is now "uncertain".
What Musk says he wants
His stated reasons are not financial; "I don't care about the economics at all," he said. He describes Twitter as the "digital town square" and wants it to allow more speech, with moderation limited to what the law requires. He has polled his followers on an edit button (74 per cent said yes), promised to "defeat the spam bots", wants to open-source the ranking algorithm, and has floated a subscription model, with Twitter Blue members paying to avoid ads and data collection. He has also criticised the permanent ban on Donald Trump, which raises the obvious question of whether it will be reversed. Jeff Bezos, the world's second-richest man, needled him within hours by asking whether the Chinese government, a key market for Tesla, had just gained leverage over the town square.
What it means here
Twitter is small in Bangladesh next to Facebook, but it is where the country's journalists, diplomats, academics and activists talk to the outside world, and where government agencies increasingly post first. A looser moderation policy cuts both ways: less risk of a legitimate account being suspended, more room for the coordinated harassment that already targets Bangladeshi women journalists on the platform. A paid tier would change little for most users here, since Twitter has no local payment route.
The deal needs shareholder and regulatory approval and is expected to close later in 2022. Whether Musk, who already runs Tesla and SpaceX, will run Twitter himself is not clear; Agrawal, appointed by co-founder Jack Dorsey only last November, stands to receive about $42 million if he is pushed out.
Update: Musk tried to walk away from the deal in July 2022, was sued by Twitter, and completed the purchase on 27 October 2022 at the original price.
