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

The billionaire promises to make online speech freer. That is harder than it sounds

Apr 30th 2022

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.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “A bird in the hand”