💰 sold for $44b
It's official: Elon Musk acquires Twitter for $54.20 per share to take it private.
Hey👋
Welcome to the mesha tribe: a biweekly newsletter by mesha that brings you all the latest developments in Crypto, NFTs, and Web3 to help you take your net worth #ToTheMoon🚀
📢 We’re inviting 1,000 early access users to team up and buy NFTs with Mesha. Create a team wallet, invite your friends, and split the costs (including gas) across the team.
Benefits:
An original NFT designed by Mesha
100,000,000 $MESHA tokens allocated for early access
Periodic giveaways of blue-chip NFTs to our first 1,000 users
Early access is open to anyone in our community who has reached Level 4, or higher. Get involved in our Discord, share your favourite NFTs, and meet your next teammates!
Sounds good? Sign up below👇
Great! Let’s get started.
The Big Story
He did it.
From first announcing his plans to buy Twitter to actually making it happen. All in less than two weeks.
On Monday, Twitter confirmed that it accepted Tesla CEO Elon Musk's bid to buy the social media giant for $54.20 per share in cash, or around $44 billion.
The takeover marks one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history that gives the world's richest person an opportunity to reshape discourse on a platform used by 200 million people every day.
The buyout offer represents a 38% premium to Twitter's stock price as of April 1, the last day before Musk disclosed his 9% stake in the company.
Twitter shares rose about 5.5% to $51.63 on the news.
So far, the announcement has received a mixed response on Twitter. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey endorsed Elon, calling him "the singular solution" for the company's future. Others, such as Lex Friedman and Michael Saylor, hailed the deal as "a big win for free speech."
But some users, including Twitter employees, expressed their unhappiness (and confusion) with the deal, saying that it could potentially undo the years of work they’d put into moderating the toxic corners of the platform.
For crypto, the sale brought some good news as the prices of cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin—a popular meme-based token heavily promoted by the Dogefather himself—surged by more than 25% to $0.16.
This was mainly around speculation that Musk could soon allow advertisers to pay DOGE for ads on Twitter, similar to what he did for Tesla, which now accepts the token as payment on its online merchandise store.
Upcoming changes
Similar to his other undertakings, Musk's plans with Twitter are bold and ambitious. For starters, he wants to work on -
relaxing content rules to promote free speech
creating an edit button
opening up access to Twitter's algorithm
launching an attack on "bot armies" that scam users
removing advertisements and instead, switching to a subscription-based model.
Seeing the words “free speech,” some users floated the idea of possibly reinstating former US President Donald Trump, who was banned last year for violating Twitter's rules. But even before Musk could comment on it, Trump himself said that has no plans of returning to the platform.
“We did a lot for Twitter when I was in the White House. I was disappointed by the way I was treated by Twitter. I won’t be going back on Twitter,” Trump told CNBC.
What does it mean for crypto?
Some of the above changes are massively important for crypto's wider adoption. Presently, NFT and DeFi communities are plagued with several scams and fraud where attackers and spambots lure in unsuspecting users via links and make millions.
More recently, there have been multiple cases of verified Twitter accounts spamming users to promote fake NFT airdrops.
Musk plans to put an end to this by launching an attack on these bots and authenticating all real humans…which itself presents another set of privacy-related issues.
In addition, he also remains adamant about making Twitter's algorithm open to the public by placing it on GitHub, a popular code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. This could especially help crypto developers, as transparency and collaboration will allow them to build greater trust in their projects and for users to become more comfortable with crypto-adjacent concepts.
The road ahead
As of now, the company’s future remains uncertain. “There is indeed uncertainty about what will happen after the deal closes,” Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal told employees during a town hall meeting, adding that no layoffs are planned "at this moment."
The deal is expected to close later this year as it's pending regulatory approval. All that’s left for us to do is wait and see what Musk has in store for us. Suffice to say,
Share what you learn 🤝
Found this newsletter insightful? Well, then subscribe and share it with your friends and colleagues.
We, at Mesha, believe in democratizing finance. Join us and share your thoughts with our growing community.
Bye!✌️