On April 14th, billionaire Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, offered to buy the social media platform, Twitter. Several months before, Musk began building up his stock in the app. Twitter accepted his offer and agreed to sell itself, but progress in this deal has been slow and difficult. 

The billionaire’s journey to his deal with Twitter began months before he made an offer. In the first few months of 2022, Elon Musk began buying Twitter stock and making comments about the platform. CNN Business states that on January 31st, 2022, Musk started buying Twitter shares to expand his stake in the company. 

On March 24th, according to CNN Business, “The billionaire begins to make pointed statements about the platform from his account.” He also posted a poll asking his followers if they think Twitter adheres to the principle of free speech. 

On April 4th, it was revealed that Musk was Twitter’s largest individual shareholder with a stake of over 9%. A day later, the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, announced that Musk would be joining Twitter’s board of directors. Musk agreed not to acquire over 14.9% of Twitter’s shares as part of this appointment. 

However, on April 10th, Musk decided not to join the board of directors. Four days later, according to CNN Business, Musk offered to buy all shares he didn’t own at a valuation of $41.4 billion. He explained that he wanted to unlock Twitter’s potential and allow it to thrive. On April 25th, Twitter announced that it had agreed to sell itself to Elon Musk in a deal valued around $44 billion. 

Musk’s many statements about Twitter show that if he owned the platform, he would make changes, and he has very ambitious plans. If Musk ends up owning Twitter, he says that he would reverse the ban on former president Donald Trump. In addition, according to the New York Times, Musk plans to increase Twitter’s annual revenue by over $20 billion by 2028. He also wants to cut reliance on advertisement to under 50% of revenue. Musk anticipates the number of Twitter users to grow from 217 million in 2021 to almost 600 million in 2025, and he expects an increase in Twitter employees. 

Musk has large dreams for the social media platform, but we may not be able to see them become reality. Recent developments in the deal have created questions about whether or not the deal will actually go through. 

CNN Business states, “Shares of Tesla (TSLA) have plummeted about 20% since Musk first disclosed plans to buy all of Twitter and take it private.” This led to people believing  that he will not be able to make the multi-billion dollar purchase. 

Also, according to CNN Business, on May 13th, Musk tweeted that his deal with Twitter was temporarily on hold because he wanted to confirm that fake accounts on Twitter make up less than 5% of users, which is what Twitter claims. This created a disagreement between Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CEO, and Elon Musk. 

CNN Business explains that Agrawal and Musk exchanged a series of tweets over the issue, and after Agrawal explained how Twitter attempts to fight and measure fake accounts, Musk responded with a poop emoji. One day after the exchange on Twitter, on May 17th, Musk announced that his acquisition of Twitter cannot not move forward until he finds more information about the number of fake accounts, and he believes that Twitter falsified the number of fake accounts in filings. 

 Musk’s two successful industries are evidence of his strong ambitions, which are expanding to social media platform, Twitter. He has goals to transform the platform, but some suspicions and disagreements may prevent him from achieving these goals. This has led many to believe that this deal will not close, but when doubting a wildly successful entrepreneur who is also the richest person in the world, you can never be too sure.

Sources:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/17/tech/twitter-elon-musk-timeline/index.html 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/06/technology/elon-musk-twitter-pitch-deck.html 

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/11/investing/tesla-stock-elon-musk-twitter/index.html https://www.npr.org/2022/05/13/1098741154/elon-musk-twitter-deal-hold-pause