The Twitter board has unanimously approves Elon Musk offer to buy the social media for a sum of $44 billion. The world’s richest person, Musk has said that he is going to keep it private and will release the source code.
This is the tweet Elon tweeted to announce the acquisition:
🚀💫♥️ Yesss!!! ♥️💫🚀 pic.twitter.com/0T9HzUHuh6
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022
before that, he had tweeted :
I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022
and :
And be my love in the rain
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022
Highest price for a social media platform
So far, Twitter’s price is the almost twice the price of any other social media acquisition. In the past, Salesforce had bought Slack for a sum of $28 billion. LinkedIn was paid $26 billion by Microsoft. Facebook had acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion and Instagram for $1 billion a while ago. Another Microsfot acquisition was Skype for 8.5 billion. Ages ago, Google had bought YouTube for a whooping $1.65 billion. And, Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 is also a notable high price acquisition in the tech industry.
Acquisition prices:
Twitter: $44 billion (Elon Musk)
Slack: $28 billion (Salesforce)
LinkedIn: $26 billion (Microsoft)
WhatsApp: $19 billion (Facebook)
Skype: $8.5 billion (Microsoft)
YouTube: $1.65 billion (Google)
Tumblr: $1.1 billion (Yahoo)
Instagram: $1 billion (Facebook)
Full history of events that led Elon to buy Twitter
It all started on March 24, 2022
He asked in a pool if “Twitter algorithm should be open source?” 82% wanted it to go open source according to this poll:
Twitter algorithm should be open source
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2022
The next day, Musk had posted another poll in Twitter with a warning – “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” The question was – Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” 70 % had a No option chosen.
The next day he tweeted:
April 4, 2022
On April 4th, Musk disclosed that he had acquired 9% of Twitter’s shares. That made him the biggest shareholder of the company. The news helped Twitter stock to surge.
And then he posted another poll on the 4th about the idea of an edit button. Although that was just a fun poll, more than 4M people had voted…
Twitter Board made him a board member. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal also shared his statement about Elon joining the board, welcoming him:
Now, that was not as easy as Parag said. The board was worried that Elon will eventually takeover the company. So, they had added a condition that he would only buy less than 15% of the stock of the company.
Elon was not happy. He refused to become the board member. The Twitter CEO announced Elon Musk’s decision on April 4, 2022:
April 14, 2022
On April 14th, he shared a hostile bid for Twitter for $54.20 per share. The price was a 54% premium to where the stock traded before he had invested in Twitter.
Twitter tried its best to stop Elon from taking it over. His seriousness was also questioned.
On April 21st, Musk made it clear how serious he was in terms of acquisition of the company. He had lined up $46.5 billion in financing for the deal. On the weekend, Musk and the board worked out a deal and the original offer of $54.20 per share was accepted by the board.
After the deal Musk said: “Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
Here is Twitter CEO’s response (note: he hadn’t tweeted since sharing the news of Elon not-joining the board):
What next?
I will update it here when things are made more clearer. Stay tuned.
I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022
Musk’s statement:
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.
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