Elon Musk’s multi-billion-dollar deal to purchase social-media company, Twitter, could be 24 hours away after months of uncertainty.
A Friday deadline for the deal’s completion was set by a Delaware Chancery Judge, who weighed in after Musk initially sought to renege on the agreement in April this year.
The 44-billion-dollar agreement seems all but certain to close after the South African-born billionaire entrepreneur visited Twitter’s San Francisco offices, while making a notable change to his Twitter profile.
Musk shared a 9 second clip of himself entering Twitter’s Headquarters carrying what looks like a porcelain sink — with a message “entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in”.
Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in! pic.twitter.com/D68z4K2wq7
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022
Not short on comedy despite the hefty price tag — he also changed his twitter profile to Chief Twit — the clearest sign yet that he’s already embracing being the new boss there.
Principal Analyst at market research company Insider Intelligence, Jasmine Enberg says: “Well, at this point, it’s almost certain that Musk will buy Twitter, and he has every reason to want to close this deal by Friday in order to avoid going to trial, where he could suffer even more reputational damage and where it’s looking more and more likely that Twitter will win.”
After a legal back and forth, including Twitter suing the world’s richest man after he sought to back out of the deal, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO then proposed proceeding with the initial agreement earlier this month, calling for the end of litigation in that regard, as a new era at the social media company beckons.
Enberg adds: “On Musk’s to do list is to clarify exactly what he means by free speech and also set clear guidelines for content moderation on the platform. Now, Musk has been incredibly vocal about the fact that he wants to loosen the content moderation guardrails that Twitter has in place. But he hasn’t said exactly how he intends to do that. Most likely, he is going to run into a lot of the same problems that Twitter leadership is facing right now, which means balancing his vision of free speech with the laws that govern the countries that Twitter operates in.”
Twitter employees expressed their “sinking feeling” earlier this week in an open letter warning that Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers would hurt the company’s ability to service the public conversation, calling the threat “reckless”.
