If you’ve been following global business news these past few weeks, then you’ve most certainly been hearing a lot about Elon Musk buying the famous social media platform, “Twitter”.
It is one of the highest profile deals in the world of Tech. Companies in recent history since it involves a public figure with global star power in Elon Musk and one of the biggest social media companies in the world in Twitter.
It was however by no means a smooth business transaction. Quite the opposite actually, it involved a very fair bit of suspense and drama that is almost reminiscent of stuff you’d see on TV shows.
So how exactly did this very famous piece of business happen?
The Earlier Relation Between Elon Musk and Twitter
When Elon Musk is not busy building electric cars and space rockets, he’d seemingly be spending a significant portion of his time on Twitter.
Elon tweets quite frequently and his tweets are fairly diverse in nature compared to other public figures in the world. While many of his tweets are usually about his business (namely SpaceX and Tesla), he also tweets about less serious subjects such as jokes, memes and GIFs. In doing so, he amassed over 100 million Twitter followers.
Initial Investments
In spring 2022 though, Elon splashed around 2 million dollars and in doing so, acquired a 9.2% stake in Twitter making him its largest shareholder. As a result, Musk was offered a seat on the board, an offer he would later decline though.
In a sharp but not totally unexpected turn of events, Musk publicly announced he would like to buy the whole company for 44 billion Dollars.
Twitter’s leadership at the time where not very welcoming of such an offer, especially that Musk had started publicly attacking the platform and speaking of his plans for Twitter, should the transaction go through.
The Drama Intensifies
It didn’t take long though for Twitter to change their stance as 44 billion was a very tempting figure and 11 days after the offer was publicly announced, twitter leadership in turn publicly accepted.
At that point however, Elon Musk seemed as though he wanted to back out of the deal. He started making serious accusations that Twitter where not being transparent with him with regards to the percentage of fake accounts, scammers and bots on the platform.
Twitter would say that bots make around 5% of the total number of users on the platform while Musk estimated that the figure to be within the range of 20%. Twitter presumably presented data that supports their claims, but Musk was still unconvinced and announced that the deal is on hold.
Legal Action
The battle of words between Musk and Twitter would go on for 3 more months during which Twitter’s stock value suffered resulting in the company value falling far well beneath the 44 billion dollars offer. Twitter then, wanted this transaction to go through at all costs.
As a result, Twitter actually filed a lawsuit against Musk and that lawsuit did involve its fair share of drama as confidential text messages between Musk and Twitter Leadership were revealed to the public.
By the end of the trial along with all the drama it entailed, the deal was finalized.
The Reign of Musk begins
One of Musk’s first decisions as owner of Twitter was firing many of Twitter’s top executives and it is claimed that much more lay offs would still follow that could amount to 50% of the company’s work force.
Musk being the bold business leader that he is, we can expect no shortage of similarly bold decisions on the far and short term with regards to how he plans to run Twitter.
Why did Elon Musk buy Twitter?
Much has been said about the reason behind Musk buying the platform. There have been hundreds if not thousands of takes on the matter all over the internet.
But let’s take it from the man himself, he tweeted that the reason he bought twitter was as per below.
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner without resorting to violence”
According to Musk’s official words, the motive behind buying twitter was not a business one as much as it was of a rather humanitarian nature. Only time will tell how true that is.
You would not expect a person like Elon Musk to make such a huge investment though without a business plan with a solid ROI. He is also not exactly the person who’d shy away from big bold decisions and so, it should be very exciting to see what Elon does with Twitter during the upcoming period.
Keywords: Elon Musk, Twitter, Social Media, Business, Tech Companies
References
(29) How Elon Musk bought Twitter – YouTube
Why Did Elon Musk Buy Twitter? New Letter Reveals Reason (newsweek.com)
