Twitter has agreed to acquire Ilona Maska as part of a deal valued at $ 44 billion. announced Monday afternoon.
“The proposed deal will provide a significant cash prize, and we believe it is the best way for Twitter shareholders,” said Brett Taylor, an independent chairman of the company’s board of directors.
Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, reiterated his plans to remake Twitter as a forum dedicated to promoting freedom of speech.
“Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is a digital urban space where issues vital to the future of humanity are discussed,” he said in a statement.
Musk also said he plans to “make open source algorithms to increase trust, defeat spam bots and authenticate all people” on the platform.
The New York Times is the company’s largest private transaction in two decades reported.
The council voted unanimously in favor of the acquisition. The deal is expected to be completed this year subject to Twitter shareholders ’approval.
No white knight
The official acquisition completes the drama, a valuable soap opera, between the famous Mercury Mask and one of the most famous social networks in the world.
Earlier this month, the billionaire revealed that he had become Twitter’s largest shareholder, and shortly thereafter offered to buy the company directly and make it private. The Twitter board initially resisted the proposal by accepting it measure against absorption known as a poison pill.
But the council decided to negotiate after Musk updated his proposal to show he had secured funding, and after other grooms did not speak, according to media reports.
“It all came down to the fact that no other bidders or white knights appeared in the mergers and acquisitions,” said Daniel Ives, a Wedbush analyst who follows Twitter. Board members “pressed their backs to the wall when Musk detailed his $ 46 billion funding last week to formalize the deal,” Ives said.
Changes in Twitter
Musk, a prolific Twitter user with 83 million subscribers, calls himself an “absolute freedom of speech.” He had previously described the changes he would like to see on the platform, including ending content moderation, removing ads from the platform, cracking down on spam and allowing users to edit tweets.
In a recent TED interview, Musk said he would like to see Twitter mistaken on the side of permission to speak instead of moderating it. He said he would be “very reluctant” to delete tweets and would usually be wary of permanent bans. Musk said it was “quite dangerous” to “mysteriously promote and lower tweets” and to have a “black box algorithm”. He also acknowledged that Twitter will have to comply with national laws governing speech in markets around the world.
The news of the takeover polarized Twitter users. Republicans in Congress have pushed up to Mask restore the account of former President Donald Trump, the platform’s most famous tweeter to him banned forever after the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. But liberals, as well as scholars who study online speech, warn that Mask’s influence could open up a platform for abuse and dirt.
“The transfer of Mask of the Bridle to Twitter will undoubtedly reveal the conspiracy theories that the platform has tried to silence, and any attempt to use the platform to legally share information will be marred by a toxic cesspool of disinformation,” the nonprofit Media Matters for America said. in the statement.
