Oliver Haslam on April 26, 2022, 1:13 am

It’s Official: Elon Musk Just Bought Twitter For $44 Billion

In a move that brings a two-week-long saga to an end, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has now officially bought Twitter for a total of $44 billion. The move means that Twitter is now a private company once again after a buyout that equates to $54.20 per share.

Musk had previously made himself the company’s biggest shareholder when he spent almost $2.9 billion before it was announced that he would be joining the social network’s board.

That ultimately never happened, with the suspicion at the time being that Musk was avoiding the move to allow him to put together an overall buyout package. That has now come to fruition.

What this means for Twitter in the long run remains to be seen, but Musk has been outspoken about various things that he believes to be problems with the platform.

The lack of an edit button is already being worked on, but Musk believes that Twitter blocks free speech, something he will no doubt intend to work on. He’s also previously said that he would reduce the number of crypto scams that take place on Twitter, while also suggesting that ads could be removed for people who pay for the Twitter Blue subscription.

“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,” said Mr. Musk. “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.”

As is so often the case with Elon Musk, all eyes will be on him to see where things go from here. Whether the buyout will be a good thing for Twitter’s users remains to be seen, with Musk’s potential moves already dividing the user base.