Elon Musk buys twitter at $44bn

 The board of Twitter has agreed to a $44bn (£34.5bn) takeover offered by the billionaire Elon Musk.

Mr Musk is the world's richest person, according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated net worth of $273.6bn mostly due to his shareholding in electric vehicle maker Tesla which he runs. He also leads the aerospace firm SpaceX.

Thursday, April 14th, Elon Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share. On April 25th, Twitter accepted the deal.

Mr Musk, who made the shock bid about two weeks ago, said that Twitter had such  "tremendous potential" that he would unlock. He also called for a series of changes from relaxing its content restrictions to eradicating fake accounts. The firm initially rebuffed Mr Musk's bid, but it will now ask shareholders to vote to approve the deal.

According to SEC filings, Musk sold about 9.6 million shares in Tesla, worth around $8.4 billion, as he seeks to line up the financing for his takeover bid of Twitter. Tesla’s share price fell about 12 percent earlier in the week, but has since edged up about 3.5 percent.

"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," Mr Musk said in a statement announced.

"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," he added.

"Twitter has tremendous potential - I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."

Is Elon Musk doing it for the money

Musk is a very rich guy. So, naturally, he would say that he isn’t interested in buying Twitter to make money. He views Twitter as the “de facto town square” and wants to open source the social media company’s algorithm. He’s trying to frame the whole takeover bid as some sort of crusade to protect free speech.

But even a free speech maximalist like Musk needs to convince shareholders that his buyout offer is in their financial self-interest. Otherwise, what are we really doing here?