Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter for over $40bn

AS TWEETS GO “I made an offer” seems relatively unexciting. But when the offer in question is from Elon Musk to buy Twitter, the social-media platform itself, that is a different matter. On April 13th the boss of Tesla and SpaceX made a cash offer of $54.20 a share, valuing the firm at $43.4bn. The bid is a third higher than Twitter’s price when Mr Musk first revealed that he had . His plaintive tweet raises another barrage of questions about the future of Twitter and the world’s richest man.Mr Musk set out his reasoning in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s main financial regulator. He believes that Twitter has “potential to be the platform for free speech” which he sees as a “societal imperative”. Achieving this and letting the company thrive requires it to be taken private, he reckons. Mr Musk signed off the filing by saying: “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.” He later said that he was not in it for profit but the public interest in maintaining a “de facto town square”.