On Monday, April 25th, 2022 Elon Musk struck a deal to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars and this deal hopes to be closed by the end of the year.  

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world currently with a net worth of 268.2 billion dollars with a Twitter following of 83 million people, he is also the owner of Tesla and SpaceX which gave him the majority of his wealth. 

Twitter’s board has already approved the sale, but it still has to be approved by shareholders. If shareholders accept his deal they will be able to sell their shares for $54.20, which is 38% over the premium of twitter’s share price of this month or shareholders can hold onto their shares until Twitter goes private to cash them out. 

Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter because plans to make Twitter an app for free speech and wants to give users more control of what they see on the app. 

He doesn’t want to take people out of the app that he disagrees with because that would infringe on the freedom of speech that he is trying to accomplish with Twitter. 

Musk plans to lift some moderation policies that Twitter currently has, he also hopes that his ownership over the app doesn’t cause people to leave and it will start bringing more people into the app. 

Musk wants to add an edit button, he wants people who subscribe to Twitter blue to be able to pay with the cryptocurrency dogecoin, add an algorithm, and eliminate spambots. 

Brian Etchison, a coach at Lakeland uses Twitter frequently to promote track and other sports has some thoughts on Elon Musk buying Twitter.

Etchison has stated ¨I think that it is great that he’s buying Twitter, there are some issues with moderation and I think that adhering to free speech is very important¨ 

John Keating, an Economics and Political Science teacher also has his own opinion on the matter. 

Keating has stated ¨Since Twitter is known as a place where people can talk to each other and is very popular it makes me nervous that only one person would own the company but it is no different than Mark Zuckerberg owning Facebook¨

Keating also stated from an economic standpoint that it is a good investment for Elon Musk, but it won’t have any impact on everyday people even if they do use Twitter. 

Elon Musk plans major things for Twitter, he plans on making the app for free speech and giving users more freedom of what they see on the app.