Why Does Elon Musk Want To Buy Twitter?

Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has offered to buy Twitter for more than 40 billion dollars (£30.5 billion) in a move that prompted the same question across the world: why?

The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX boss has proposed buying “100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash”, valuing the company at $41.39 billion.

The 50-year-old, whose bid comes soon after he bought a 9% stake in Twitter and said he would join the board, believes changes are needed in order to help the site thrive and better support free speech.

In just ten days, Musk has gone from popular Twitter contributor to the company’s largest individual shareholder to a would-be owner of the social platform — a whirlwind of activity that could change the service dramatically given Musk’s self-identification as a “free speech absolutist”.

Who is Elon Musk?

Musk, 50, has an estimated $273.6 billion (£209.21 billion) fortune that makes him the wealthiest person in the world, worth $92.3 billion (£70.58 billion) more than runner-up Jeff Bezos. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Canadian mother and South African father and later attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1997.

With a stable of businesses ranging from electric cars to private rocket ships, Musk did not found Tesla, which he has led from 2008. But his insight that the firm’s electric cars should be high-performance machines with sophisticated, smartphone-style software revolutionised the global auto business, prompting established companies to try to catch up while spurring new, all-electric competitors. Wall Street values Tesla at more than $1 trillion – more than all three Detroit car makers, plus Toyota Motor Corp, combined.

At the same time, his company SpaceX, has upended the space launch industry by developing rockets capable of putting satellites into space and returning to Earth for re-use.

Perhaps more than any other person, Musk has helped bring bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies into the mainstream, with Tesla holding about $2 billion in bitcoin on its balance sheet and the company among the few to accept dogecoin as payment.

Musk and Twitter

Twitter helped Musk become a household name. He has 81 million followers and built a pop culture following large enough to help him earn a spot hosting the venerable US comedy TV show Saturday Night Live in 2021.

Musk has used Twitter to go after investors, and he posts on everything from Dad jokes to polls on what he should do with his gains from Tesla’s surging stock price.

<img class="img-sized__img landscape" loading="lazy" alt="Elon Musk speaks at the Tesla Giga Texas manufacturing "Cyber Rodeo" grand opening party in Austin, Texas.” width=”720″ height=”480″ src=”https://www.wellnessmaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/why-does-elon-musk-want-to-buy-twitter-3.jpg”>
Elon Musk speaks at the Tesla Giga Texas manufacturing “Cyber Rodeo” grand opening party in Austin, Texas.

SUZANNE CORDEIRO via Getty Images

While Twitter’s user base remains much smaller than those of rivals such as Facebook and TikTok, the service is popular with celebrities, world leaders, journalists and intellectuals. Musk’s followers rival pop stars such as Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga.

What’s been going on?

Musk began buying Twitter stock in earnest only a few months ago.

Earlier this month, it was announced he had bought a 9% stake and would join the board, only for Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal to confirm that Musk had changed his mind just days later.

Now the billionaire entrepreneur has offered to buy the company outright.

In his offer letter to Bret Taylor, chairman of the Twitter board, Musk said he had invested in the social media platform “as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy”, but added “since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form”.

He said the move was his “best and final offer” and if not accepted the billionaire “would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder”.

Twitter has confirmed it has received the offer and said it will now consider it.

How could Twitter look?

Much of Musk’s vocal criticism of Twitter over recent weeks has centred around his belief that it falls short on free speech principles. The social media platform has angered followers of Donald Trump and other far-right political figures who’ve had their accounts suspended for violating its content standards on violence, hate or harmful misinformation.

Musk also has a history of his own tweets causing legal problems. He has previously run into problems with US regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over his own tweets, having been accused of breaching trading rules when tweeting about his business interests.

<img class="img-sized__img landscape" loading="lazy" alt="Elon Musk, second from left, on Saturday Night Live.” width=”720″ height=”480″ src=”https://www.wellnessmaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/why-does-elon-musk-want-to-buy-twitter-4.jpg”>
Elon Musk, second from left, on Saturday Night Live.

NBC via Getty Images

Musk has also been accused of tweeting misinformation about Covid-19 after posting in March 2020 that children were “essentially immune” to the disease.

The entrepreneur outlined some specific potential changes on Thursday — like favouring temporary rather than permanent bans — but has mostly described his aim in broad and abstract terms.

“I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk said in the filing. “I now realise the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”

Some believe a Musk takeover could mean a return to the platform for Trump and others, but reinstating those users would be a highly controversial move and could bring further scrutiny to the company and its approach to moderation, just as major new regulation for the sector is on the horizon.

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Boris Johnson To Host Downing Street Press Conference At 5pm Today

Boris Johnson will host a Downing Street press conference at 5pm today, it has been announced.

The briefing will be on the Cop26 climate change conference and the prime minister will appear alongside the summit’s president Alok Sharma.

It comes after a pact was finally agreed in Glasgow last night which saw a dramatic last-minute intervention from China and India to water down the deal to end the use of coal power.

Sharma today said the two states would have to “justify themselves” to climate vulnerable countries.

He made the comments after fighting back tears on the world stage as the deal was finally completed.

The agreement had been due to include a pledge to accelerate the “phase-out” of coal power but it was switched to “phase-down”.

The word change reduces the urgency with which countries are required to reduce the use of coal – the worst fossil fuel for greenhouse gases.

This morning, Sharma told Sky News: “On the issue of coal, China and India of course are going to have to justify to some of the most climate vulnerable countries what happened. You heard that disappointment on the floor.”

A tearful Sharma told delegates last night: “I apologise for the way this process has unfolded. I am deeply sorry.”

However, the Glasgow Climate Pact is the first ever climate deal to explicitly plan to reduce coal.

The overall deal saw nearly 200 countries agree to keep the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels “alive” or within reach.

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Facebook Cuts ‘Indefinite’ Donald Trump Suspension To A 2-Year Sentence

Donald Trump could return to Facebook on January 7, 2023.

Former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, now Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, announced Friday that the company has cut short its “indefinite” ban on Trump, which was imposed after he used the platform to spread baseless claims of election fraud and incite the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. 

In its place, Facebook has implemented a conditional two-year ban.

Should Facebook determine the former US president fit to return to the platform at the end of that ban, he’d be back just in time for the 2024 presidential election primaries. However, if “there is still a serious risk to public safety” at that time, Trump’s ban would be extended again, then reevaluated.

How Facebook intends to evaluate Trump’s risk to public safety isn’t exactly clear. Clegg said only that the decision would be based on “external factors, including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest.”

If Trump’s account were to be restored and he failed to meet the very basic demand of not posing a threat to public safety, Facebook said he would be met with “rapidly escalating sanctions,” including a potential permanent ban.

Tasos Katopodis via Getty Images

Former US President Donald Trump speaking shortly after the 2020 election.

Trump greeted the development in characteristic fashion: with outright lies and a sprinkle of half-truths.

“Facebook’s ruling is an insult to the record-setting 75M people, plus many others, who voted for us in the 2020 Rigged Presidential Election,” he said in a statement. “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this censoring and silencing, and ultimately, we will win. Our Country can’t take this abuse anymore!”

Trump received 74,222,958 votes in the 2020 election, while President Joe Biden won with 81,283,098 votes. The election was not rigged. It’s unclear what “many others” the former president is referring to.

Although Trump often claims he has been censored and silenced, the fact that his statement on the matter is nevertheless being widely read greatly weakens his argument. 

Civil rights advocates condemned the diminished sentence. Madihha Ahussain, a senior policy adviser for nonprofit anti-discrimination organisation Muslim Advocates, said too much was at stake for Trump’s ban to be loosened. 

“Facebook’s decision to reinstate Donald Trump’s accounts just in time for the 2024 presidential election puts the public and our democracy in danger,” Ahussain said in an emailed statement. “Trump used Facebook to incite a deadly riot in the US Capitol and spread outrageous conspiracies about the election that are still being used to undermine voting rights across the nation. A two-year time-out for that is a joke.”

Facebook’s decision on Trump follows its reversal on Thursday of its much-maligned, yet long-held, policy of exempting politicians from the content moderation rules that apply to everyone else. The policy gave politicians free rein to spread lies and post hate speech because Facebook deemed the content newsworthy.

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Trump Foiled In Attempt To Slip Back On To Twitter

Former US president Donald Trump’s most recent attempt to get a platform has been thwarted.

On the heels of the launch of his new webpage, “From the Desk of Donald J Trump”, on Wednesday, his team created the handle @DJTDesk on Twitter.

By Wednesday night, the account had been suspended.

“As stated in our ban evasion policy, we’ll take enforcement action on accounts whose apparent intent is to replace or promote content affiliated with a suspended account,” a spokesperson for Twitter said in a statement.

Trump’s “From the Desk” page is essentially a blog with a timeline format that resembles both Twitter and Facebook’s platforms. In the site’s brief life thus far, Trump has made a series of scattered, combative posts attacking Republicans including Liz Cheney and Mitch McConnell. He also lambasted Twitter, Facebook and Google by name.

“What Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our Country,” Trump wrote in a post on Wednesday. “Free Speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the Radical Left Lunatics are afraid of the truth, but the truth will come out anyway, bigger and stronger than ever before. The People of our Country will not stand for it! These corrupt social media companies must pay a political price, and must never again be allowed to destroy and decimate our Electoral Process.”

Both Facebook and Twitter banned Trump from their platforms in the wake of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, which left several people dead.

Twitter penned a blog post about its permanent suspension of Trump, saying it did so “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

“In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action,” the company wrote. “Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergslammed the insurrection as a demonstration by Trump to “use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden”.

“We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post at the time. “Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.”

As Facebook’s ban was “indefinite” and not permanent, Facebook’s quasi-independent advisory board said this week that it would be giving the company a six-month window to further review Trump’s suspension, and to “determine and justify a proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform”.

HuffPost has reached out to Twitter for further comment.

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Wiley Banned From Facebook And Instagram Over More Anti-Semitic Posts

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If You Don’t Show Your Child’s Face On Social Media, Does It Really Protect Their Privacy?

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Paedophile Hunters Are Destroying Families ‘In The Name Of Facebook Likes’

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Cyberflashing: Facebook Messenger Will Now Protect Under 18s From Strangers

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