“The bird is released”, tweeted Elon Musk. With a day in advance, the richest man in the world became, Thursday, October 27, owner of Twitter, announced the same day in the evening the American press. The day before, the boss of Tesla and SpaceX had gone to the Californian headquarters of the company, in San Francisco. This man with sometimes abstruse humor had curiously arrived with a sink in his arms.
Elon Musk immediately fired the firm’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, whom he had been criticizing for months, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde. All three left the company for good.
The new owner of the social network has also changed the title of his Twitter account, renaming himself “Chief Twitter”, “twit” meaning “moron” in English. In any case, he bought a company for 44 billion dollars (44 billion euros), at a price of 54.20 dollars per share, an amount considered very overpaid by all observers and the interested party himself, in view to the fall on the Stock Exchange of digital stocks since March, in particular those financed by advertising.
Mr. Musk, 51, tried for months to renege on his promise to buy, explaining in particular that the management of the company had lied to him about the number of fake accounts or inactive accounts. Attacked in court by the management of Twitter, he ended up changing his mind at the beginning of October because of the risks of judicial defeat that he incurred and respected his initial commitment. The takeover is financed to the tune of 12 billion dollars by partner banks, while the American Federal Reserve (Fed, central bank) and inflation marked the end of free money.
As of Friday, October 28, the Twitter action will leave the rating on Wall Street definitively, after a very mediocre course since its first day of listing, in November 2013, when it ended the session at 45 dollars.
An increasingly Trumpist attitude
In a post published Thursday, the richest man in the world assures very seriously that he “didn’t buy Twitter for the money. I did it to try to help the humanity that I love”. He invokes the defense of freedom of expression to explain his purchase. “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important for the future of civilization to have a common digital forum for debate, where a vast diversity of opinions can be debated in a healthy way, without resorting to violence “writes Mr. Musk.
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