Elon Musk to Buy Twitter for $44 Billion

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, will acquire Twitter (San Francisco) in a deal that values the social media giant at about $44 billion.

Twitter, whose board unanimously approved the deal, said it expects the deal to close in 2022. Upon completion, the company will become private.

The purchase price of $54.20 per share represents a 38% premium on Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1. Musk has secured $25.5 billion in debt and financing and has personally guaranteed a $21 billion equity commitment, leading to questions about where he’ll get the cash.

As Yahoo reported, Musk said he didn’t care about the economics of the deal “at all” and wanted to buy Twitter because it was “extremely important to the future of civilization.”

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