Twitter Inc is reportedly closing in on a deal to sell itself to Elon Musk for $43 billion in cash, the price that he originally offered to the social media company and called his ‘best and final’. The talks are a culmination of a huge drama that included Twitter coming up with a “poison pill” proposal—a plan to thwart Musk’s takeover bid through an offer of discounted shares to other shareholders. From a strictly business point of view, Twitter’s stubborn resistance didn’t make much sense as Musk’s offer was 54% higher than the share price when he started building his stake in the social media company in January this year.
Also, founded in 2006, two years after Facebook, Twitter has failed to keep pace with its rival. In spite of being used by the world’s most influential and powerful people, user growth and ad revenue are comparatively sluggish. Twitter’s stock price is up just 77% since listing nine years ago. Facebook parent Meta’s has increased four times as much. It is thus obvious that once Musk came up with a concrete financing proposal for his buyout bid, a large section of shareholders have been pushing the Twitter board to consider the maverick billionaire techpreneur’s proposal.
Twitter failed to read Musk right, from the start of this face-off. Musk fancies himself an ubermensch in a quest to uphold absolute free speech to secure “the future of civilization”; so, his trashing Twitter’s free speech policy, among other potshots at the company, and takeover talk was no mere billionaire megrim, as his 2018 failure to take Tesla private would have made it seem initially. Twitter, to be sure, is not in the same league as some of the Meta platforms, but it has still managed to command outsized influence because of how it shapes public debate—a de facto virtual global public square (a label Musk has also attached to it). Recall the furore over its fake-news tags for tweets and de-platforming of Donald Trump, who, many experts believe, showed us the worst ways social media can be harnessed when the Capitol siege happened.
In India, Twitter debates do sometimes spill over to the halls of lawmaking, and debates in the real world assume ‘virality’ through the medium. This, of course, has a bearing on the direction debates take—often, the louder ones manage to hector policymakers into taking undesirable positions, increasing the fragmentation of the polities they serve. Yet, Musk and his tribe of “free speech absolutists” believe that Twitter has to give up moderating content to the extent it does currently—even if that opens the floodgates for all sorts of bigotry and hate via content that strictly doesn’t breach the boundaries set by law.
For instance, the First Amendment in the US would allow lots that would be unpalatable to a progressive society to go unpoliced. Also, whether a platform that is more widely-held will be more democratic in the long run, or one that is held by a billionaire who faces allegations of strong-arming critics into silence remains to be seen. But whether Twitter can save itself from Musk and his designs for it—bear in mind, employees have been reported to be dreading what a Musk-only/Musk-plus regime would hold—is still a big question. It is not growing as fast as even Snapchat is. Analysts have handed it a poor outlook in the first quarter of the calendar year. Whether the long-term view of some investors that the stock is worth more than what Musk is offering will hold is hard to tell. As talks begin, Twitter will need to convince a majority of its shareholders that it can do a lot better than it is doing now.
