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 in what will be one of the largest leveraged buy-outs in history. Mr Musk, the boss of companies including Tesla, a carmaker, and SpaceX, an aerospace firm, put together an all-cash offer worth about $44bn. He is 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. If it is a big deal in business terms, it could be bigger still in what it means for the regulation 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: last month it was lower than at its flotation in 2013. 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.”