Elon Musk’s Confirmed $44 Billion Twitter Buyout Has the Internet on Fire

Photo Credit: Steve Jurvetson

It was confirmed Monday by Twitter that Elon Musk would be buying the company in a $44 billion buyout which has the internet completely torn. Things went from 0 to 1000 quite fast given how this all started with him being offered and turning down a board position with the company to him outright buying the whole thing in less than a month. Under the terms of the agreement, shareholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter stock which is 38% higher than how much the actual stock was worth the day before he announced his intent to purchase the social media platform.

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

This caused ire from people like activist Shaun King who tweeted ” At its root, @ElonMusk wanting to purchase Twitter is not about left vs right. It’s about white power. The man was raised in Apartheid by a white nationalist. He’s upset that Twitter won’t allow white nationalists to target/harass people. That’s his definition of free speech.”

This has Conservative media celebrating Musk, even though he is a political moderate as though this will be a champion for free speech. The issue in the free speech debate is the number of people who have been suspended for racist rhetoric online that people feel the platform should not be policing due to feedom of speech.

This of course ignores the fact that freedom of speech does not apply to private social media networks. A number of Conservatives to include former President Donald Trump have created social media platforms of their own as an offering to the Right which apparently has not been good enough. And in comes Elon Musk offering freedom of speech for all. One other issue is that advertisers do not want to use a platform riddled with racism and the like so the chances that Elon Musk is going to let people run amok on there because “muh freedom of speech” is highly unlikely. He also discussed the idea of getting rid of ads and capitalizing more on the paid side of the app that’s recently started. that’s interesting and we would like to see that happen. For a site that has struggled financially for most of its existence, it would be pretty incredible to choose to get rid of ads altogether.

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