Billionaire Elon Musk is the official owner of Twitter.
The Twitter board announced that the social media company will be sold to Elon Musk for $44 billion.
This comes after days of intense negotiations between the entrepreneur and the board.
The board notedd that Musk will pay $54.20 in cash per share for the San Francisco-based platform.
According to statement by Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal, the deal had been unanimously approved by Twitter board of directors.
Musk, whose worth is estimated at $259 billion was confirmed by the company to have secured $25.5 billion in debt and loan financing and was providing $21bn of equity commitment.
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
Elon Musk
Speech freedom
The entrepreneur made the free speech issue a central in his attempt to take over of the platform.
Before the takeover, Elon stated that “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 furthered, “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 spambots, and authenticating all humans.”
“Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
In his earlier tweets, Musk had urged his “worst critics” to stay on Twitter, before it was announced he had reached an agreement to buy it.
“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means,” he wrote.
He however leaves his critics to suggest that he will allow banned right-wing figures such as former US President Donald Trump among others .
