Musk is spending $46.5bn (€44bn) acquiring a company that lost $220m last year and whose share price was lower than when it floated on the stock market in 2013. In a sense, its business model has failed and he doesn’t appear to have a plan for turning that around. Yet, for Elon Musk, none of that has to matter.

He will finance the deal by putting in $21bn of his own money as equity. He will also borrow a further $12.5bn as a margin loan which will be secured against his shares in Tesla.

US investment bank Morgan Stanley is also leading a group of financial institutions
providing $13bn in debt financing.

Musk’s shares in Tesla are valued at around $200bn. Imagine a worst case scenario where his Tesla shares collapse in value by 75pc.

He loses his $21bn in equity in Twitter and never repaid the $12.5bn in loans in the event Twitter collapsed. Musk would find himself down to his last $15bn dollars to live on!

It took Chuck Feeney decades to give away his $8bn fortune in his own lifetime to support great causes. Musk is getting to play with money in a way that few in the history of wealth have ever gotten to do.

In normal leveraged buyouts, the acquirer later heaps all of the debt they accrued onto the balance of the company they have bought.

If Musk were to do this, Twitter would become a loss-making firm with over $25bn of debt.

As a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”, he has been critical of the company’s posting policy which he says undermines democracy.

In dressing up his ownership of Twitter as a battle for free speech, Musk is not addressing his own approach to using the platform.

This is a man who in a fit of pique tweeted that a Thailand-based caver, who helped rescue a kids football team from a cave, was a “pedo-guy”. Vernon Unsworth had dismissed Musk’s construction of a special submarine to conduct the rescue back in 2019 as having no chance of working. In a TV interview he suggested that the billionaire should stick his submarine where it hurts.

Musk responded by calling him a pedo-guy to his 22 million followers. Vernon Unsworth sued Musk for defamation in a US court.

The jury concluded that despite the reference to Unsworth being completely untrue, no defamation had occurred.

Musk’s evidence in the trial was instructive in his views on how Twitter works. He said he was not suggesting that Unsworth was a paedophile but was using it as a generic insult.

Unsworth’s lawyer pointed out that when one person sarcastically called the tweet “classy”, Musk replied “bet you a signed dollar its true”.

In court Musk suggested “there are a lot of things I say and not all of them have the same quality of thought”. The billionaire’s lawyer introduced the phrase JDart to proceedings to encapsulate Musk’s thinking on certain tweets.

It stands for a Joke that was badly received, therefore Deleted, with an Apology and then Responsive Tweets to move on from the matter.

This extraordinary case in the US and the fact that a jury found in Musk’s favour, says a lot about the value and meaning of language in public discourse there.

Musk said that on Twitter people can assert anything that comes to mind. “True, untrue, half-true. It’s where people engage in verbal combat. There’s anything on Twitter.”

In Europe the new Digital Services Act aims to hold online platforms accountable for what is published. It will significantly increase the responsibilities of Big Tech companies for the content posted.

The act sounds good in practice but inevitably it will come down to enforcement and court findings in legal challenges that may be taken.

An Elon Musk-owned Twitter will not have a need for independent directors or any kind of contrarian views from those of the owner about content, free speech absolutism and what it might take to make the company profitable.

Big questions remain about whether Musk will drive the business forward commercially or whether it will be something new to play with. The more he eases up on Twitter’s stance on content moderation, the more “verbal combat” will go up there making it a more toxic environment instead of a marketable service for potential subscribers.

Around 90pc of Twitter’s revenues come from advertising, yet in a since deleted tweet, Musk raised the possibility of removing advertising from the platform’s premium service called Blue.

It is available in the US and Australia but not the UK or Ireland. Removing advertising from this service would be very high risk. But for Musk, what is the worst that can happen?

Alternatively, the more heavily Twitter and other online platforms are regulated, the more costs are involved. If anything, running Twitter is set to become more costly, whether through high levels of compliance with new regulations or through higher legal bills from challenging regulators.

Two basic truths are emerging from this. Musk has accrued enough personal wealth that conventional measures simply do not apply. Secondly, it is up to regulators and legislators to act swiftly to protect people from the harm that the worst effects of social media can bring.

We definitely can’t rely on Elon to do that.