Elon Musk issues first statement after purchasing Twitter

Daniel Brown

Musk agreed to a $44bn deal to buy Twitter

Billionaire Elon Musk has issued his first statement after officially agreeing a deal to purchase social media company Twitter.

The board of Twitter agreed to a $44bn (£34.5bn) takeover offer from Tesla CEO Musk on Monday (April 25). It comes after he made a surprise bid less than two weeks ago.

Musk insisted that Twitter had “tremendous potential” that he would unlock, calling for several changes, including: adding an edit button for tweets and getting rid of one very specific group of users from the platform: bots.

While the firm initially rejected Musk’s bid, it will now ask shareholders to vote to approve the deal.

“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,” Musk said in a statement announcing the deal.

“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,” he added.

“Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

🚀💫♥️ Yesss!!! ♥️💫🚀 pic.twitter.com/0T9HzUHuh6

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022

It remains unclear who exactly will lead the new company, with Musk stating that he ‘doesn’t have confidence in management’ in his offer document. Twitter is is currently led by Parag Agrawal.

Reports suggested that the world’s richest man essentially had a free run at the business, with insiders claiming they were unable to secure a ‘go-shop’ provision, which would have allowed them to entertain other bidders or joint-investors in the window between the sale being agreed and finalised.

The 50-year-old bought a nine per cent stake, the equivalent of 73,486,938 Twitter shares, on March 14 and was set to join the board of directors until a class-action lawsuit from those who sold him their piece of the company, claiming he failed to follow proper declaration procedure with the SEC and resultantly prevented them from gaining additional funds from the sale.

The deal, which is expected to close later this year, has seen Musk secure $25.5bn of financing for the transaction and will take a $21bn stake in the business.

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