On April 25, 2022, Twitter announced it had accepted an offer from Elon Musk to take the company private at $54.20 per share, valuing the company at approximately $44 billion. The deal had moved quickly. Musk had taken a significant stake in Twitter only a few weeks earlier, had been offered and declined a board seat, and had then submitted the buyout proposal. The board had initially been resistant. Within days, that resistance had collapsed.
The announcement set in motion a saga that would dominate social media coverage for the rest of the year. By July, Musk would attempt to back out of the deal, citing concerns about bot accounts on the platform and various other issues. Twitter would sue to enforce the agreement. The case was scheduled for trial in October. In the days before the trial, Musk would reverse position again and agree to complete the transaction. The deal would close in late October.
The mechanics of the saga were unusual enough to be worth following at the time. The substance of what would happen to Twitter under new ownership was the more important question. Twitter as a platform had unusual significance relative to its size. The number of users was much smaller than the major social platforms, but the share of public conversation that happened on it, including from journalists, politicians, and other figures whose words mattered beyond the platform, was disproportionately large.
What the takeover bid raised was the question of how a platform with that level of public significance should be governed. Twitter under its previous ownership had developed content moderation policies through years of pressure and learning. Those policies were imperfect but represented a system that had stabilised somewhat. The promise of major changes to those policies was central to Musk’s public case for the acquisition.
The reactions to the bid revealed something about how invested different communities had become in Twitter remaining the way they wanted it to be. Free speech advocates of various definitions saw in the deal an opportunity to reverse content moderation decisions they disagreed with. Their counterparts saw a threat to the platform’s ability to limit harmful content. Both groups treated the platform as more important than its commercial scale would have suggested.
The closing of the deal in October was the start of a different chapter. The consequences for Twitter, for social media regulation, for advertiser relationships, and for the platform’s technical and content stability would unfold over the months that followed.