Did Elon Musk buy Twitter? Inside the unexpected acquisition of the social media platform

• Elon Musk officially reached a deal to buy social media platform Twitter.
• The billionaire took the company private by paying $54.20 per share, paying about $44 billion in total.
• Musk had spent months trying to back out of the agreement. 
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In October 2022, billionaire Elon Musk completed a deal to acquire social media platform Twitter for $44 billion after a wild six months. Here’s a timeline of the deal. 

April 2022

Musk said he had acquired a 9% stake in Twitter, making him the largest shareholder in the company. 

Musk then offered to buy Twitter, saying he would pay $54.20 a share. In response, Twitter enacted a poison pill to stop Musk’s bid.

But on April 25, Twitter said it would agree to be acquired by Musk for $44 billion. In announcing his acquisition plans, Musk said he wanted 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.”

May 2022

By the beginning of May, he was expressing reservations about the deal he’d signed and soon Musk tweeted it was was “on hold,” launching months of back and forth over claims about bots, or inauthentic accounts.

July 2022

While Musk said in an initial statement on the acquisition that he wanted to control Twitter, in part, to “defeat the spam bots,” he proceeded to claim the problem was worse than Twitter had let on, amounting to fraud and allowing him to walk away from the deal.  

He sent a letter to Twitter at the start of July, purporting to terminate the acquisition. Twitter sued him promptly in what proved to be a contentious and costly court battle.

October 2022 

On October 28, Twitter and Musk formally closed on the billionaire’s offer to take the company private by paying $54.20 per share, or about $44 billion. The same evening, Musk ousted CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal, sources said. 

“The bird is freed,” Musk tweeted.

As a result of the new deal, Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk over the $44 billion purchase came to an end.