Calamos Supports Greece
GreekReporter.comBusinessElon Musk Proceeds with Twitter Buyout Aiming to Create the 'X' App

Elon Musk Proceeds with Twitter Buyout Aiming to Create the ‘X’ App

elon musk tesla work from home remote office
Elon Musk wants to create something he called ‘X’ after he acquires Twitter. Credit: Daniel Oberhaus / Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0

Elon Musk has offered to complete his proposed $44 billion (£38bn) acquisition of Twitter in a U-turn on his decision to walk away from the deal.

Lawyers for Musk confirmed in a court filing on Tuesday that the world’s richest man is prepared to push ahead with the transaction on the agreed upon terms following months of legal drama.

Musk said buying Twitter Inc. would speed up the creation of something he called “X, the everything app,” suggesting he wants to add new services to the social media platform he’s trying to take private.

In his first public remarks since reviving the effort to buy Twitter for about $44 billion, Musk called the acquisition “an accelerant” to building a kind of multi-function app.

Musk wants to make Twitter more like WeChat and TikTok

Musk has mused aloud about making Twitter more useful, indicating he wants it to be more like WeChat, a messaging service that’s hugely popular in China, and TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing service that has taken off across the US.

He has drawn parallels to so-called super apps that are common in parts of Asia, letting people use a single smartphone application for a broad range of services from messaging and other communications to ordering food and summoning a car.

At Tesla Inc.’s annual shareholder meeting in August, Musk stressed that he uses Twitter a lot and that he has ideas on ways to make the platform “radically better.” He compared his ambitions for Twitter with the vision he had for X, a financial services company he co-founded in 1999.

“I do sort of have a grander vision for what I thought X.com or X corporation could have been back in the day,” Musk said.

“It’s a pretty grand vision, and obviously that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years.” He went on to say, “it’s something that will be very useful for the world.”

The filing for the acquisition of Twitter followed a report from Bloomberg on Tuesday that the Tesla chief executive had written to Twitter offering to close the deal at the original price of $54.20 a share, which resulted in a temporary suspension of trading in the company’s stock as the price rocketed more than twelve percent in New York.

The shares closed up 22.2 percent at $52.

Related: Twitter Town Square: What Elon Musk Could Learn from Aristotle

See all the latest news from Greece and the world at Greekreporter.com. Contact our newsroom to report an update or send your story, photos and videos. Follow GR on Google News and subscribe here to our daily email!



Related Posts