As people within and outside of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters scratched their heads on Thursday at Elon Musk's $43 billion offer to buy the social media platform, the author of a recent book on Tesla's rise was by no means surprised.
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The Wall Street Journal reporter Tim Higgins, who wrote "Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century," told KCBS Radio on Thursday morning that the world's richest man was following a well-trodden path.
"What have wealthy people traditionally done over the last 100 years?" Higgins said. "They've often tried to buy their local newspaper to exert their power."
"We’ve seen that with (Amazon founder) Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post," he continued. "And in this era, Twitter is the modern-day newspaper."
Musk, who is worth more than $250 billion according to Bloomberg, said from TED 2022 in Vancouver on Thursday that he views Twitter as "kind of the de facto town square."
Twitter has about 200 million users, far fewer than Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram. Last year, a Pew Research survey found that just 46% of its American users are on the website and app every day.
In a letter to Twitter chairman Bret Taylor on Thursday morning, Musk said he wants to unlock the platform’s "extraordinary potential," claiming he is the only person capable of doing so. He said in Vancouver that, after taking the company private, Twitter would "open source the algorithm" for transparency.
"This is not a way to sort of make money," Musk said in Vancouver. "My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important. So the future of civilization, but you don’t care about the economics at all."
Twitter held a town hall meeting on Thursday following Musk’s bid, according to multiple reports. CEO Parag Agrawal told employees that the company’s board would evaluate Musk’s offer, and a source told Reuters that Argawal said the company wasn’t being "held hostage."
Outside of Twitter's offices in San Francisco, some wondered why Musk would want to own a social media company.
"I hope it's something for altruistic reasons, but it seems like he just wants his hands in everything," Patrick Wong, who doesn’t use Twitter, told KCBS Radio.
Others, like Jose Coronado, wanted to see Musk clean up Twitter’s content. Musk, in his letter proposing he buy all of the Twitter stock he doesn’t own for $54.20 a share, said he invested in the company earlier this year because of “its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe.”
"Twitter is a little bit toxic nowadays," Coronado said. "Let's see what happens."
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