World’s richest man Elon Musk has tabled a bid to acquire social app Twitter.
Presently about 217 millon active users are on the App and it offers a platform where celebrities, politicians, technicians connect and air their views.
The bid came just weeks after Mr. Musk became the company’s largest shareholder (though his holdings appear to have been eclipsed since then by the investment management giant Vanguard). He offered $54.20 a share, valuing the company at roughly $43 billion.
Mr. Musk, a Twitter power user with nearly 82 million followers, has long argued for the need for unfettered public speech. He has repeatedly criticized Twitter for moderating its platform too restrictively, and he previously floated the notion of radically shifting the power in social networking to users and away from behemoth companies
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe,” Mr. Musk said in a letter sent to Bret Taylor, the chair of Twitter’s board, on Wednesday. “I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.”
“Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” he said Thursday. “I don’t care about the economics at all.”
Born in Pretoria, on June 28, 1971, the son of an engineer father and a Canadian-born model mother, Musk left South Africa in his late teens to attend Queen’s University in Ontario.
He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania after two years and earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and business
Elon Reeve Musk FRS (born June 28, 1971) is a South African-Canadian-American businessman. He was born in South Africa. He moved to Canada and later became an American citizen