Elon Musk is taking Twitter’s “public square” private

ELON MUSK, the world’s richest man, has described Twitter as the “de facto public town square”. On April 25th he struck a deal to take it private. Mr Musk, the boss of companies including Tesla, a carmaker, and SpaceX, a rocket firm, put together an all-cash offer worth about $44bn, stumping up the bulk of the financing himself in the form of $21bn in equity and a $12.5bn loan against his shares in Tesla. It amounts to one of the largest buy-outs in history. If it is a big deal in business terms, it could be bigger still in what it means for the future of online speech.Twitter isn’t an obviously attractive business. With 217m daily users it is an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook, the world’s largest social network, and has slipped well behind the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Its share price has bumped along for years. It is like a modern-day Craigslist, writes Benedict Evans, a tech analyst: “Coasting on network effects, building nothing much, and getting unbundled piece by piece.”