Twitter’s 11-member board met with the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk and approved on April 25 the Tesla founder’s acquisition of the social media platform. The repercussions of this are yet to be seen.
The deal brings arguably the internet’s most influential platform under the control of one of the world’s richest people. Musk, a prolific Twitter user, has repeatedly decried efforts to moderate speech on the service.
“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 in a statement posted to Twitter.
“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.”
Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock once the transaction closes. It’s a 38 percent premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1 — the last trading day before Musk disclosed his approximately 9 percent stake in Twitter.
