If a month ago, someone had said that Elon Musk would buy Twitter, it would have been deemed impossible,” says Raheel Khursheed, former head of news, politics and government at Twitter India and South Asia, and now co-founder of streaming tech platform Laminar Global. “But he has done it, and that too, in a  record 21 days, even though we will know if the final deal will go through only by October or so.” 

It all began on April 4, when Twitter confirmed that billionaire entrepreneur, and CEO and Product Architect of Tesla, Elon Musk held a 9.2 per cent stake in the company, worth around $2.9 billion. On April 5, he was asked to join the board, which he rejected a few days later, tweeting, “Is Twitter dying?” On April 14, Musk offered to pay $54.20 per share to buy 100 per cent of Twitter in an all-cash deal. A week later, Musk said that he’d secured $46.5 per share in funding, after receiving finances from Morgan Stanley and other institutions backed by his Tesla’s equity stake. On April 25, Musk and Twitter, both agreed to seal the deal with his original offer of $54.20 a share. The transaction, one of the biggest buyout offers of recent times, is valued at around $44 billion. Musk tweeted that he’d prioritise free speech on the site, open-source its algorithms, eliminate spam and add new features.