Twitter’s board accepted a buyout offer from Elon Musk, in a cash deal valued at roughly $44 billion, the company announced today.
Though the billionaire was initially invited to join the board members of Twitter, he declined and instead offered to buy the company.
The deal comes after Musk secured $46.5 billion in funding last week, to acquire the company.
"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," said Musk in a statement announcing the deal.
He continued to say that he plans to make “Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”
Musk claimed that Twitter has a lot of potential, and he aims to work with the company and also the user community to explore it. Shares in Tesla, which Musk also runs, fell on the news of the acquisition, which must still go through rounds of approval.
