After many twists and turns, Elon Musk has officially completed his acquisition of Twitter, which began in April 2022 with Musk’s entry as a major shareholder in Twitter. The first thing he did when he appeared after the acquisition with the washbasin was “cleaning”.
Earlier this fall, Musk began working on a Twitter acquisition that had been hanging in the air for months. However, in July, Tesla’s CEO terminated the agreement, accusing Twitter’s leadership of breaching the purchase agreement by misrepresenting the number of spam and fake bot accounts.
And yesterday, the deal closed to acquire the social media platform. He will pay $46.5 billion in equity and debt financing and cover the purchase price and closing costs. Musk tweeted in the morning — “The bird is freed“.
However, the transfer of power was not a smooth one. According to The New York Times, Musk is said to have fired several high-ranking executives in a first official act, including the previous Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. In addition, CFO Ned Segalm and the two lawyers Vijaya Gadde and Sean Edgett are said to have been fired. It is unclear what role Musk himself will play. On Twitter he calls himself “Chief Twit.”
Musk has argued that Twitter may need to cut staff significantly, if not as much as the previously reported 75%, to keep operating costs down. He also said he bought Twitter because he hopes to transform it into an “anything goes app” called “X,” but it’s unclear what that is.
He told investors that by 2028, Twitter will have annual revenue of $26.4 billion and more than 930 million users. By the way, in 2021, Twitter had annual revenue of just over $5 billion and about 200 million users.
It will be interesting to see how he changes Twitter in the future, and he will probably continue to provide us with plenty of topics to talk about.
