THE SQUIZ

Cheers and fears has been the reaction to news that the world’s richest man Elon Musk has bought Twitter for US$44 billion ($61.2 billion). The entrepreneur/big Twitter user, who launched the takeover bid before Easter, said the social media company has “tremendous potential”, and he wants to reduce moderation on the site to encourage freer speech. The Tesla/SpaceX boss said Twitter is a digital “town square” which should be a forum for open debate, tweeting to his 80 million followers that “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”

BACK IT UP A BIT…

Fair enough because it’s unfolded quickly. Musk was one of Twitter’s biggest fans before he bought a 9% stake in the company in April, making him the biggest shareholder. Things started to get a bit weird about a week later when Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced that Musk was set to join the board, which the multi-billionaire then rejected. Then things headed into hostile takeover territory, and Twitter fought back to thwart the deal. But by the end of last week, Musk provided corporate regulators with the details of how he would finance it, including US$25.5 billion in debt and US$21 billion in equity financing against his Tesla shareholding. And after discussions on the weekend and Monday, the Twitter board unanimously approved the sale.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Musk says he will privatise the platform, which is a fancy way of saying he will take it off the stock market and have the company all to himself with his investors riding shotgun. That’s got the blue tick of approval from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who tweeted that “it has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model” – which is a hint that he didn’t like what Twitter has turned into with public shareholders to answer to. So why’s Musk doing it? He recently said that he wanted to buy Twitter because of the power and influence rather than the money it could generate. Even so, the debt will need to be financed, which some say could come from a leaner business model. For now, Musk is tight-lipped about his plans, but there is a lot of interest in how he’s going to run it. The European Commission is one who says he must protect users from harmful content. Someone who’s not much interested is former US President/covfefe king Donald Trump… He says he’s sticking with his fledgling/struggling platform Truth Social.