The world’s richest man is buying Twitter (TWTR:NYSE) after billionaire Tesla (TSLA:NASDAQ) and SpaceX chief executive and founder Elon Musk struck a deal with the social media platform on Monday (25 April 2022).
Musk will pay $54.20 per share, matching his original offer that will see Twitter shareholders get $44 billion in cash. When the deal closes, Twitter will become a privately held company once again.
After a press release announcing the deal, we have a pretty good idea of Musk’s priorities.
‘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,’ he said. ‘I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.’
Musk, a longtime Twitter user with over 80 million followers, has been detailing his feelings about the service for years now. One byproduct of his buying Twitter might be to massively shake-up the cryptocurrency status quo.
CRYPTO SHOCKWAVES
Musk, the dogecoin-backing billionaire, had already sent shockwaves through the bitcoin and wider crypto world when he first revealed his initial 9% stake in Twitter in early April. That news sent Bitcoin tumbling 15% over the following days and saw dogecoin jump more than 20%.
Musk is a well-known dogecoin pumper, having used Twitter to evangelise the canine cryptocurrency multiple times. Outright ownership of Twitter could, some speculate, see dogecoin become the de facto payment across the platform.
‘Speculators have been buying dogecoin due to Elon’s obsession with the cryptocurrency, and hence the potential for dogecoin to be given more utility on one of the biggest social media networks once Elon has official control of the company,’ said Marcus Sotiriou, analyst at UK-based digital asset broker GlobalBlock.
Over the past month dogecoin has rallied 20% to $0.16, compared to bitcoin’s 6% fall to $31,850.
