Elon Musk has announced his official acquisition of Twitter. The world’s richest man made the disclosure via his Twitter account on 27th October 2022. This comes after a Delaware Court issued an ultimatum that he seals the deal with Twitter before 28th October 2022.
Recall that Twitter sued Musk in a Delaware court for failing to honour his obligation to the company and to its many shareholders and also, after Musk declared intent to purchase Twitter but announced his withdrawal later, citing the use of bots and fake accounts which, according to him, impeded his accurate determination of the business worth of the social media giant. The $44 billion deal is finally sealed.
Twitter’s shareholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock they own under the agreement, marking a 38 per cent premium over Twitter’s closing stock price at the start of the month.
Read also: Twitter Launches New Edit Button
The 51-year-old billionaire tweeted that he wanted to personally inform the public about his motivations for buying Twitter. He vows to make a free speech the “bedrock of democracy”.
Musk said his motivation for buying the platform is, so it becomes a “digital town square.” Musk, whose new Twitter byline reads as “Chief Twit”, posted a video of himself on 26th October 2022, walking into the company’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a porcelain bathroom sink, he mentioned in the tweet that he was “meeting a lot of cool people.”
Elon Musk said, “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.
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.”
Elon Musk’s Investment footprint
In 2002, Musk founded the aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company SpaceX.
In 2004, Musk joined electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) as chairman and product architect. He became Tesla’s CEO in 2008.
In 2006, he invested in SolarCity, a solar energy services company that was later acquired by Tesla and became Tesla Energy. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence. Moreso, in 2016, Musk founded The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. He also co-founded Neuralink the same year, a neurotechnology company focused on developing implantable brain-machine interfaces.
Musk’s wealth has skyrocketed over the past decade thanks to his ownership of Tesla and his involvement and investments with SpaceX — expected to exponentially grow over the next two years as he expands into space tourism and the potential of humanity reaching Mars.
According to Forbes Real-Time Billionaire List, the 51-year-old Musk is currently the wealthiest person in the world, with a staggering net worth of $270.1 billion, nearly $70 billion more than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ estimation of $190 billion.
According to a new study by global payables automation platform Tipalti Approv, SpaceX is predicted to hit an unprecedented milestone in the year 2024.
“Since 2017, Musk’s fortune has shown an annual average increase of 129 per cent, which could potentially see him enter the trillion-dollar club in just two short years, achieving a net worth of $1.38 trillion by 2024 at age 52,” says Tipalti Approve. “SpaceX generates massive incomes by charging governmental and commercial clients to send various things into space, including satellites, ISS supplies, and people.”
About Twitter
Now owned by Elon Musk, Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled to 280 for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, through Short Message Service or its mobile-device application software. Twitter, Inc. It is based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the world.