Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October last year at a price of $44 billion. At the time, his acquisition had created a buzz in the tech world owing to the lengthy and tumultuous process, which included Musk convincing Twitter’s board of directors for the sale of the company before backing out from the deal himself. At the time, his decision had raised a lot of eyebrows owing to his rocky relation with the platform. Now, six months after the acquisition, the Tesla CEO has finally revealed the reason behind his move.
In an interview with BBC journalist James Clayton, Musk revealed the reason why he bought the company. During the interview, Clayton asked Musk whether his $44 billion Twitter deal was something that he went through willingly or if he feared that the court might force him to buy Twitter. To this Musk answered in affirmative.
Musk agreed that he went through with the deal because of the court case that Twitter’s board of directors had filed against him in order to make him sign the deal and honour his initial deal. At the time, Musk believed that his case was not strong enough legally, which is why he decided to honor the deal and go through with the acquisition.
During the interview, Musk admitted, after taking over the company, when he walked into Twitter with that sink and a smiling face, he didn’t really want it to happen.
After taking over Twitter, Musk has laid off a majority of Twitter’s workforce and made many swathes of changes to the platform. The list not only includes introducing paid verification checkmarks in order to boost Twitter’s revenue, but also introducing coloured checkmarks for identifying different types of accounts, removing legacy blue checkmarks, making most of Twitter’s recommendation algorithms open source making Twitter Blue available to users across the globe and restricting access to the platform’s polls feature to Twitter Blue subscribers.
More recently, he removed Twitter’s web home button with “Doge” meme icon and labeled BBC and NPR as state-media platforms. In addition to this, he also blocked users from commenting, liking or sharing Substack links on the platform after the publishing platform introduced its Notes feature.