Forget Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company — Elon Musk is now the owner of Twitter.
Elon Musk owns Twitter, and his new big idea is charging people to read more than a few hundred tweets per day. Verified Twitter Blue subscribers can read up to 6,000 tweets per day, no one can browse the site without logging in, and unverified accounts are limited to reading 300 tweets per day, which Musk blames on AI startups scraping the site to feed large language models like ChatGPT.
How’d we get here?
On April 4th, 2022, we learned that Musk had purchased enough shares of Twitter to become its largest individual shareholder. Eventually, he followed up with an unsolicited offer to buy 100 percent of Twitter’s shares for $54.20 each, or about $44 billion. Twitter accepted Musk’s offer, but then things got weird because he tried to cancel the deal.
There was a lot of back-and-forth about bots and text messages, but in the end, Musk settled on buying the company rather than facing a deposition or Chancery Court trial and eventually strode into Twitter HQ carrying a sink.
Since then, there have been layoffs, more layoffs, and even more layoffs — plus drama over Substack, unpaid bills, and blue checkmarks. With ad revenue still down from previous years, Elon finally abdicated the role of CEO, installing longtime NBCUniversal ad executive Linda Yaccarino.