After months of uncertainty, Musk finally agrees to buy Twitter for $44bn

In April, Musk announced his grand plan to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share. Then he cold shouldered the deal and backed away, stating his concerns regarding the platform's higher than claimed spam accounts with far fewer real users actively on the platform.

Fast forward and Elon Musk has decided to go through with his takeover of Twitter for $44 billion (£38 billion). Twitter had sued Musk over his original pull out from the deal and after months of deliberating and legal wranglings, Musk made the offer in a letter to Twitter, filing on Tuesday 4th October with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. With the threat of litigation from Twitter the Tesla CEO has gone ahead with purchasing the social media giant.

Musk is no stranger to Twitter. With a following of over 83 million on Twitter, he has used the platform quite prolifically and he understands all too well the power of a tweet, when in 2021, stating that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin as a currency of exchange, sent the value of Bitcoin down 15%.

It's a very powerful medium, with 500 million tweets per day being exchanged, which Donald Trump found out to his cost, by being 'permanently suspended' from the social media platform due to the risk of further incitement to violence in January 2021, for breaching ~twitter's rules, leading to him setting up his own social media platform, Truth Social, which has failed to take off. Will Musk's takeover of Twitter allow Trump to be re-instated?

"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," he added.

"Twitter has tremendous potential - I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it." Elon Musk wants to protect 'free speech' - but by putting the world's largest social media giant in the hands of the world's wealthiest man, can that be good or bad for free speech? The Twitter board voted unanimously to accept the deal, so they must see the benefits of Musk taking over the helm, although he declined an earlier invitation to join the board. The Twitter board see the value of this deal as a focus on value, certainty and financing.

Now that the sell is finally going through, according to Musk, by the end of October, we now wait to see whether Musk's planned 'cleaning up' and deleting of spam accounts, will lead the way to a more policed social media platform, devoid of the clutter, caused in recent years, by the plague of spam accounts.