A meeting hastily arranged for the world’s richest man in a house rented from Airbnb.
This is very important for the future of Twitter. Elon Musk recently became Twitter’s largest shareholder. Now there are whispers, he also wants to join the board of the company.
Twitter Chairman Brett Taylor arrived at the meeting, but he did not expect what he saw.
He later texted Elon Musk, “I haven’t had a meeting in a weirder place lately.”
He added, “They were probably looking for an Airbnb somewhere near the airport. There was everything from tractors to donkeys.”
But the meeting went well.
A few days later it was announced that Mr. Musk was joining Twitter’s board.
Then Elon Musk surprised everyone with an announcement on April 14 – he wants to buy Twitter alone.
That is why he offered a price of 44 billion dollars, i.e. 4 thousand 400 million dollars and said that if it is at this price, he will buy it, otherwise not.
Twitter’s board immediately rejected the price. They also took measures to prevent Elon Musk from buying Twitter.
But then Twitter’s board changed their mind. They said they agreed to Elon Musk’s proposal. Twitter officially announced this on April 25.
Elon Musk, speaking about his plans for Twitter, said it had actually lost its way. He said that Twitter was restricting the right of expression too much and, as the ‘town hall’ of the world, it should give the right of expression the highest priority.
Speaking at a trade conference in Vancouver, Canada, he said he was not at all worried about the company’s finances.
But in the weeks and months after Elon Musk announced his purchase of Twitter, tech companies’ share prices were falling on the stock market. Twitter’s value as a company also began to decline. Then many analysts began to raise questions, Mr. Has Musk paid too much for Twitter?
However, Mr. Musk was openly raising some different questions – one of them is, how many real user accounts are there on Twitter?
Elon Musk is at the top of Forbes and Bloomberg’s list of the world’s richest people. His wealth is 250 billion, that is, two thousand five billion dollars. Elon Musk has been complaining for a long time that there are too many bots or automatically created fake accounts on Twitter.
When his offer to buy Twitter was accepted, he kept asking how many real users Twitter actually had.
Twitter executives said at the time that less than 5 percent of daily active users were actually ‘bots’, or automated artificial users. But Elon Musk was angry after hearing these statistics.
Twitter CEO Mr. Agarwal gave a long post on how they calculated this number of bot accounts. Mr Musk responded to the post by posting a ‘poop’, poop emoji.
Elon Musk’s deal with Twitter is about to collapse. Then on July 8, he announced that he wanted out of the deal.
Whether Elon Musk was trying to negotiate a lower price for Twitter or actually wanted out of the deal is hard to say.
But Twitter did not want to accept these words. They were arguing that Elon Musk is legally bound by the deal he signed to buy Twitter and has no way out.
Both sides then hired high-profile lawyers, and a court hearing in Delaware was set for Oct. 17, where Mr. Musk would be forced to buy the company as part of the deal.
In court filings, Twitter said it provided Elon Musk with substantial information about the platform’s actual users.
But Mr. Musk said the actual number of bot accounts Twitter publicly claims may be several times higher. He even accused the company of fraud.
Such constant criticism of the company in public was hurting Twitter. Most of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising. Advertisers wondered exactly how many people their ads were actually reaching.
These pressures were causing quite a disruption in the Twitter headquarters as well. Some Twitter employees wanted Elon Musk to become their company’s CEO. But many were saying, privately and publicly, that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter would be a disaster, for everything from the company’s overall mission to content moderation.
