Despite claiming in a recent interview that “technically” he could afford to purchase Twitter personally, Musk has chosen instead to fund the $44bn (£34.5bn) takeover with $21bn of his own money plus debt structures.
The threatened poison pill response from the Twitter board appears to have been ineffective in the light of threatened legal action by Musk against the board members who, surprisingly, own virtually no Twitter stock themselves leaving themselves open to serious fiduciary malpractice suits if they had not entertained Musk’s offer as being of major benefit to the shareholders.
Musk had publicly offered to “save $3m a year” on Twitters bottom line by not paying any board members (Musk himslef takes no salary for any of his management roles) and so it remains unclear whether the current board will simply disolve, whether founder Jack Dorsey (a friend of Musk) will now remain and who will steer the company in the short term. Musk will appear at an employees meeting to handle questions in the coming days/weeks.
Musk has made much of the need for a free speech platform for the world as a whole – calling it “the bedrock of a functioning democracy” even if that free speech may be negative or oppose our own views. He is known to prefer “timeouts” to lifetime bans similar to the one imposed on ex-president Trump.
“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” he tweeted on Monday.
One critic (Robert Reich former US Secretary of Labor) alleged in the Guardian that Musk had bought Twitter “to preserve his own free speech and not free specch for other people” and so we will need to wait to see what free speech means under a new Twitter and whether Musk can live up to his ambitions for a better Twitter.