The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, bought Twitter on October 27, 2022, Musk bought Twitter for 44 Billion dollars. Adding CEO of Twitter to his many titles, which includes: Founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Founder of The Boring Company and X.com, Co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI, Zip2, and lastly President of the Musk Foundation. He is fifty-one years old and has an estimated net worth of $181 billion dollars that continues to grow. 

Musk started buying shares of Twitter in January 2022. By March, he owned 5% of the shares, and by April, he had 9%, making him the biggest shareholder. On April 13, 2022, Musk offered 43 million dollars to buy Twitter. In response, Twitter’s board made a plan to make it more expensive for anyone who wanted to buy 15% or more of shares. A week later, Musk planned to buy Twitter for 46.5 billion dollars, but later that day, he bid 44 billion dollars. In his bid, he used 12.5 billion dollars of loans with his Tesla stock, causing the stock market value of Tesla to drop more than 125 billion dollars. This resulted in Musk losing about $30 million of his net worth. Before going through with the bid, Twitter’s shares dropped more than 10%. Initially, Musk said he would continue with the bid but then terminated the deal in July 2022. On July 12, 2022 Twitter’s board sued Musk for breaching a legally binding contract. Stating he would buy Twitter. In October 2022, Musk offered to purchase Twitter again for 54.20 dollars per share, which resulted in Musk officially buying Twitter for 44 billion dollars on October 27, 2022. 

Twitter has gone through many changes since being purchased by Elon Musk. Recently Musk has allowed complete freedom of speech on Twitter. Which now allows former President Donald Trump back on Twitter after being kicked off in 2021. Another huge change is when Musk purchased Twitter he fired over half of the staff working at Twitter. Afterward, Musk gave the remaining Twitter employees an ultimatum. He told them they must work in an “extremely hardcore” fashion or leave. On November 17th, Twitter locked the remaining staff out of their offices until Monday, November 21, 2022, for an unknown reason to why. With Twitter having immensely less staff than in October of 2022, many people wonder if Twitter will shut down for good. Musk responded on Twitter to that rumor: “The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried” (BBC News). Twitter has also undergone small changes such as changing the color of the verified icon and making users pay $7.99 if they want to be verified. This worries users at the fact that now anyone can become verified, even people that would not qualify on other social media apps. Twitter has gone through many changes since being bought by Elon Musk and there will be more. We will just have to wait and see what else Elon Musk has in store for us.