Elon Musk Spends $44B To Preserve Free Speech In America

Twitter and Elon Musk have struck a deal for Musk to take over the social media platform, as relayed by the Wall Street Journal and several other outlets.

Musk's latest reported offer to buy the company was estimated to be $44 billion. Per the New York Times, Twitter agreed to be taken over at $54.20 a share, "a 38 percent premium over the stock price when it was revealed that Mr. Musk had become the company’s biggest shareholder."

Musk himself released a statement on the deal.

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.

"Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."

According to PR Newswire, the deal was unanimously approved by the Twitter Board of Directors and is expected to close this year, "subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders, the receipt of applicable regulatory approvals and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions."

As we relayed on OutKick earlier, Musk had tweeted early Monday that he hoped his critics would remain steadfast in challenging him -- an indication that a deal was about to go through.

“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk tweeted.