SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has bought Twitter for $44 billion, making it the world’s most expensive deal.
Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, transferring control of the social media platform, which has a population of millions of users, to the world’s richest man. This means that Twitter has now entered into a decisive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, according to the company’s press release.
The price is $54.20 per share in cash (which means not shares in SEC-speak, and not actual cash, by the way). Thus the total value of the transaction is approximately $44 billion. Upon completion, Twitter will become a privately held company and will no longer have its shares traded on any stock exchange.
Read more: Twitter set to accept Musk’s $43bn buyout offer
In this regard, Musk said, “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.” He went on to say, “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.”
According to Musk, Twitter has tremendous potential and he looks forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it. He has secured $25.5 billion of fully committed debt and margin loan financing and is using about $21 billion of his own equity on top of that to finance the purchase.
