Everything You Wanted to Know About Elon Musk's Twitter Buyout

Hi there.

Here’s a collection of interesting information related to Elon Musk’s proposed buyout of Twitter:

• The board of Twitter recently accepted an offer of $44 billion to buy the company. — CNN

• “The deal is expected to close in 2022, but it is dependent upon Twitter shareholder approval, regulatory approval, and other closing conditions.”—Investopedia

• The buyout offer is almost 40% higher than Twitter’s value before Elon Musk first revealed he quietly became the largest shareholder of Twitter (9% at the time) — Reuters

• How many users are there on Twitter? “In the last reported quarter, the number of global monetizable daily active users (mDAU) on Twitter amounted to 217 million users. The last published figure regarding monthly active Twitter users amounted to 330 million before the company discontinued reporting on the metric.” — Statista

• Elon Musk himself has 84.9 million users on Twitter as of 26/4/2022

• The tool Sparktoro estimates 47.6% of those are fake…

  

  Screenshot on Sparktoro

• He’s tweeted ~17,500 times (while not counting deletions)

• On bots, he recently said, “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 spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” — CNBC

• In the last 12 years, Twitter was only profitable in 2 of them — Statista, Twitter Inc. annual reports

• Elon Musk said during a recent Ted talk, “This is not a way to make money. My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization."

• Twitter’s 2021 revenue from advertisements was $4.5 billion (~89% of all revenue), in 2020 it was $3.2 billion (~86%) — Twitter Inc. annual reports

• Regarding advertisements on Twitter, Elon tweeted (and later deleted): “no ads. The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive.” — Yahoo Finance

• Where will the $45 billion come from for the world’s richest man? “Musk, 50, has outlined the $13 billion in bank financing secured by the social-media company and the $12.5 billion backed by a pledge” — Bloomberg

• “The deal includes a provision that the billionaire must pay a so-called reverse break-up fee if he were to walk away or the agreement falls apart.” — Bloomberg (same link x 2)

• A reverse breakup fee is a potentially large fee to be paid if a party backs out of a takeover deal

Tweeting on Tweeting:

• Will people who disagree with him be kicked off or censored? He had this to say:

  Elon Musk @elonmusk

  I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means

• And, perhaps more controversial, almost 2 months before:

  Elon Musk @elonmusk

  Starlink has been told by some governments (not Ukraine) to block Russian news sources. We will not do so unless at gunpoint. Sorry to be a free speech absolutist.

• Jeff Bezos, the world’s 2nd richest man, pointed out a potential conflict for Elon:

  Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos

  Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square? https://t.co/jTiEnabP6T

  

  Mike Forsythe 傅才德 @PekingMike

  Apropos of something: -Tesla's second-biggest market in 2021 was China (after the US) -Chinese battery makers are major suppliers for Tesla's EVs. -After 2009, when China banned Twitter, the government there had almost no leverage over the platform -That may have just changed

• Counterintuitively to his free speech absolutism, “Mr. Musk himself has had a rocky relationship with online speech. This year, he tried to quash a Twitter account that tracked the movements of his private jet, citing personal and safety reasons.” — New York Times

• Weirdly too (at least to me), Jack Dorsey, the previous CEO of Twitter and one of its co-founders, tweeted out an interesting thread. One of the lines read, “Elon is the singular solution I trust” — (context needed, here’s the thread link):

  jack⚡️ @jack

  The idea and service is all that matters to me, and I will do whatever it takes to protect both. Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.

• Will the chubby senile bastion of fake news leveraging come back to Twitter? “I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH.” —Mr. Trump on Fox News

• As of 26/04/2022, Mr. Trump has posted only one message on TRUTH. — NYMag

• Mr. Trump also stated 30,573 documented lies during his 4 years as president — Washington Post

A List of Proposed Changes to Twitter Elon Musk Will Make:

• Getting rid of all ads to remove corporate power behind the algorithms (in a tweet since deleted) — Time

• Releasing the algorithm to be open source — NPR

• Restructure the censoring (hello 2016 again) — NPR

• Authenticating all humans (goodbye anonymity)

  Elon Musk @elonmusk

  And authenticate all real humans

• Defeating the spam bots

  Elon Musk @elonmusk

  If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!

• An edit button (prepare for more fake modified tweets and he said/she said) — NPR

• Option to pay for the Twitter Blue service with dogecoin — CNBC

• Make Twitter Blue slightly cheaper

  Elon Musk @elonmusk

  And authenticate all real humans

Another Amusing Statistic:

The 10 wealthiest Americans are now:

1. Elon Musk

2. Jeff Bezos

3. Bill Gates

4. Larry Ellison

5. Mark Zuckerberg

6. Larry Page

7. Warren Buffett

8. Sergey Brin

9. Steve Ballmer

10. Michael Bloomberg

Screenshot from Wikipedia

Nine out of those ten people now own massive sources of news in our society.

Sigh.

---

This message has been brought to you by a non-lizard-king named J.J. Pryor.

👇Click the heart thingy? The algorithm loves it. I love it more.👇