Billionaire Elon Musk on Monday has acquired the microblogging website Twitter for nearly $44 billion with shares valued at $54.20. Musk has promised a more lenient touch to policing content on the platform.
Calling it his ‘best and final offer’ on April 14, Musk had announced his takeover bid, which initially saw Twitter’s put in place a ‘poison pill defense’ against the adverse takeover. However, once the billionaire announced that he had secured funding, the board went into negotiations with him.
Musk on Friday had met “privately with several shareholders of the company to extol the virtues of his proposal” and also made video calls to them to push for his case, according to Wall Street Journal.
In a tweet posted earlier today, Musk, who describes himself as a free speech absolutist wrote, “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he had written in a filing to the US SEC, adding that “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”
Musk, who had already proposed plans to make the microblogging website private, tweeted recently, “If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!” followed by another post which said he would want all humans on the platform authenticated.
With a fortune of nearly $279 billion, Musk is the world’s wealthiest person, according to Forbes. But much of his money is tied up in Tesla stock. According to FactSet, he owns about 17% of the electric car company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion — and SpaceX, his privately held space company.
