Twitter has officially accepted a $44bn offer from Elon Musk to purchase the social media site.
After Twitter’s board initially took steps to discourage Musk’s multi-billion-dollar takeover bid, significant progress was made after he personally met with them for talks over the weekend and a deal was concluded on Monday evening.
Musk, who recently usurped Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest man, made a $54.20 per share offer for Twitter two weeks ago and said at the time that it was his “best and final” offer.
That audacious bid came just days after he became the platform’s largest shareholder, after purchasing a 9.2% stake worth around $3bn and vowing to make “significant” changes, starting with the Twitter Blue subscription service.
After turning down an opportunity to join the board, which would have prevented him from launching a takeover bid, Musk has now closed a deal to buy the whole business and take it private.
It is believed that the board was initially sceptical about the approach but became open to the prospect after Musk said he would use two-thirds of his own assets and funding from major Wall Street banks to finance a huge $46.5bn package.
Now the deal has gone through, Twitter looks set for a huge shakeup, with Musk claiming he wants to “unlock” its “extraordinary potential”.
In a statement following the purchase, he again spoke about the need to uphold free speech as part of a “functioning democracy”.
He added: “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”.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518677066325053441?s=20&t=NzyL_7hVJdde2CuhZkrK0A
Less-stringent moderation and a wider spread of views from across the political spectrum could make Twitter a completely different environment for brands, which may face greater risks in engaging on the platform.
However, Musk’s expertise in online payments, among other areas, could power new social commerce strategies and help the company to become more profitable.
Either way, with the 50-year-old now set to become an all-powerful social media CEO, like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter is likely to undergo transformative change in the coming years.
