How Elon Musk Became First African American To Own A Major Media Company By Buying Twitter

• With Twitter’s purchase, Musk becomes the first African American to own a major media company in the world
• Musk holds a South African and Canadian citizenship

On Monday, April 25, Twitter’s board accepted Elon’s offer of almost US$44 billion to buy the company after almost two weeks of hard negotiating tactics. With the deal, shareholders will get US$54.20 per share, which is 38% above the share price the day before we learnt that he had bought a significant share of the company, on 5 April.

The announcement comes after weeks of public Twitter spats amid the hints about the negotiations, and Musk’s ongoing trolling of Twitter, its CEO and board, and its big name users.

On 4 April, we learnt that Elon had quietly being buy Twitter shares and had grown his stake to 9.2% of the company, to become its biggest single shareholder. He was offered a seat on the board, but it came with ‘handcuffs’: he could not buy more than 14.9% of the shares and had to be “loyal” to the company.

Elon rejected the seat on the board. Meanwhile, the board thought it had found its ‘white night’ when Vanguard upped its investment to 10.3% of the shares, so that it overtook Elon as the biggest single shareholder.

On 14 April, Elon mentioned his ‘Plan B’ in his Ted Talks interview and then announced his offer to buy Twitter for US$43 billion. The board initially rejected the offer, hoping for another ‘white night’ to come along. But then questions were posed about the board acting in the best interests of its shareholders and its fiduciary duty in this regard, given that Elon’s offer was more than generous.

A board meeting was called on 25 April, after which a statement was released in which the sale was confirmed. In the press release, Elon says: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated … 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. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it”.

Musk is himself a huge Twitter account user, with some 80 million followers. He posts regularly about his life and his businesses, and has called out Twitter on many occasions, including about it boasting about big name users who rarely tweet and suggesting that Twitter is dying. He also tweeted in regard to the Twitter board holding almost no shares of Twitter, and therefore “their economic interests are simply not aligned with shareholders”.