The man who builds electric cars and aspires to travel to Mars has suddenly been termed a social media tycoon. It wasn’t a simple task. Twitter’s board of directors activated a “poison pill,”; a strategy for preventing a takeover by flooding the market with shares, making a buyout more expensive.
Elon’s $44 Billion Offer.
After Musk revealed that he had acquired $46.5 billion in finance. The board became more open to the possibility of a takeover. Musk said he put in 21 billion in stock financing, while banks, including Morgan Stanley and other corporations throughout the world, lined up another 25 and a half billion in various forms of debt and margin loan financing, according to the securities and exchange commission filing.
This is higher than his previous offer to buy out for 54.20 per share, for a total of $44 billion, which he stated was his best and final offer, and that if it didn’t work out, he’d sell the 9% of shares he already owns and walk away.
His original offer of 44 billion dollars was eventually accepted by Twitter’s board of directors. The poison pill was then rejected by the board. It may have bolstered Musk’s case that the board isn’t looking out for the best interests of shareholders if it had remained in place. The sale was unanimously authorized by the board.
Twitter’s independent board chair stated that the company’s board of directors went through a thorough process to evaluate Elon’s proposal; with a deliberate focus on value certainty and finance. The proposed transaction will provide a significant cash premium to Twitter stockholders. Musk is said to have visited with several shareholders in the aim of exerting pressure on the firm and changing their decision, he even intimated that he was willing to bypass the board by appealing to owners to sell their stock to him directly, a procedure known as a tender offer.
How will things be different?
So, now that Musk is in charge of Twitter, how will things be different? He’s toyed with a number of alterations, like converting the company’s headquarters in San Francisco into a homeless shelter; adding an edit button, and, above all, altering the bird logo to a doge.
Musk expressed his desire for Twitter to become a “public square for free expression” in his initial SEC filing. “I now know the firm will neither grow nor serve the societal imperative in its current form,” he says, adding that Twitter has the potential to be a forum for free speech around the world. Some speculate that he could reactivate Donald Trump’s Twitter account, which was suspended indefinitely following his statements on the 2021 Capitol riots.
Open-sourcing Twitter Algorithm and free speech.
Open-sourcing Twitter’s algorithm, which determines which tweets are promoted and which are demoted, is critical to Musk’s vision. To put it another way, making it public so that others can see it and improve it. That way, he claims, there will be no behind-the-scenes manipulation to push certain tweets . Musk believes that free speech is critical to democracy and that there was too much censorship during his April Ted Talk.
He claimed that speech should be as free as possible. And that he would err on the side of not removing content that was controversial. He thinks the ideal policy for a social app is when the most extreme ten percent on both the left and right are equally dissatisfied, but content moderation is extremely difficult. Every day, billions of dollars are spent by large tech companies to review millions of uploads.
Elon’s Purchase Prompted Questions.
Ex-Reddit user In a thread arguing that the Tesla CEO doesn’t fully understand the difficulty of content moderation and protecting free speech, warns Musk that he’ll be in for a world of pain.
“Elon isn’t going to solve some issues,” he continued. I’m positive he has no idea what he’s getting himself into. He claims that large platforms like Twitter have no choice but to censor because the internet has grown so large that anyone can post anything, anywhere, at any time, necessitating some sort of moderation. Musk’s purchase of Twitter; he concluded, will harm all of humanity by diverting Musk’s attention away from his mission at SpaceX and Tesla, as it will eat up his time and harm his psyche.
Musk’s reaction to the “novella of a thread” was that Twitter was long overdue for long-form tweets. Don’t bet against him, his legions of die-hard fans may say. There are a lot of people who dislike him. When Musk officially confirmed his desire to buy the app with over 200 million daily users, he tweeted; “I hope that even my critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means.”
