Twitter is under new management.

A lot has been going on with Tesla and SpaceX's CEO, Elon Musk, and the Social Media Giant Twitter.

For those of you who have been living under a rock though, don't worry, this blog will get you up to speed.

What's been happening till now?

On April 4, 2022, Elon Musk became Twitter's largest shareholder owning 9.2% reportedly worth $2.9 billion of the microblogging social network. 

The very next day, Musk was offered a seat at the table of Twitter's board of directors which he later turned down only to then go ahead and launch a surprise bid for the company on April 14 in which he offered to acquire all shares that he didn't own at $54.20 per share which valued the company at $43.4 billion.

As a response to this, Twitter deployed its 'poison pill', A corporate anti-takeover defense mechanism, which would have preserved the right of Twitter's shareholders to buy more stock at a relatively inexpensive price.

After continuous discussion between Musk and Twitter, On Monday, April 25, 2022, Elon Musk and Twitter made a deal worth $44 billion.

Why did Elon Musk buy Twitter?

Musk has called himself a 'free speech absolutist'. In various of his tweets, he has been advocating the philosophy of 'Free Speech'. 

The image above is one of the multiple tweets put out by the new owner. In another tweet, he has even said that he hopes that his worst critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means.

To clarify his meaning of free speech, Musk put out another tweet shown below.

What lies ahead for Twitter?

"Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it," said Musk in a statement.

Twitter will return to being a privately held company and Musk has expressed his various plans for Twitter in a series of tweets. Some of these plans are:

• Removal of ads: Musk revealed that he plans to get rid of all ads on the platform and rather move to a subscription-based model to generate revenue for the product.
• Do away with bots: Musk plans on getting rid of the millions of bot accounts using advanced AI algorithms. Besides this, Elon also wants all human Twitter users to be authenticated.
• Transparency: Earlier this year Elon put out a poll on Twitter asking users whether Twitter's algorithm be made open-source to which voters responded with a strong "Yes".

What do you think the future holds for Twitter? Give me your views in the comments below.