Elon Musk Acquires Twitter for US$44 Billion — The Day Social Media Became Personal Property

On 27 October 2022, Elon Musk closed the acquisition of Twitter Inc. for US$44 billion (US$54.20 per share). By the end of his first day at the San Francisco headquarters, he had personally dismissed CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, legal head Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett. Together the four executives were owed roughly US$200 million in change-of-control compensation; Musk asserted "for cause" termination to refuse payment and was promptly sued.

Six Months of Litigated Chaos

On 14 April 2022 Musk publicly offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share—a 38% premium. The board accepted on 25 April. On 8 July, Musk attempted to walk away, claiming Twitter had misrepresented the share of bot accounts. Twitter sued in the Delaware Court of Chancery seeking specific performance. Days before trial, in early October, Musk reversed course and agreed to close on the original terms. The six-month farce drew SEC scrutiny and shareholder lawsuits alleging market manipulation.

Half the Workforce Gone in a Week — The 4 November Layoff

On 4 November 2022, one week after closing, Twitter laid off roughly 3,700 employees—about half of the 7,500-strong workforce—by a single email sent overnight, with badge access revoked the same morning. Ethical-AI, marketing, search quality, public policy, wellness, and curation teams were effectively eliminated. About 15% of the Trust & Safety team was cut; its head, Yoel Roth, resigned on 10 November. Dozens of dismissed workers were re-contacted within days because their roles turned out to be load-bearing. Multiple class actions followed under the federal WARN Act (60-day-notice requirement for mass layoffs).

Dismantling Content Moderation; Reinstating Trump

Musk styled himself a "free-speech absolutist". The permanently suspended account of Donald Trump was reinstated on 19 November on the basis of a Twitter poll (51.8% in favour). Jordan Peterson, Kanye West, Babylon Bee and others followed. The COVID-19 misinformation policy was rescinded in 2023; "state-affiliated media" labels on Russian government outlets were briefly removed, while NPR and the BBC were temporarily labelled "state-affiliated" alongside them—both later corrected after public backlash.

The verified-badge system was rebuilt. Once a free identity check, it became a paid feature at US$8/month (Twitter Blue) from November 2022. Within hours, an Eli Lilly impersonator tweeted "insulin is free now"; the pharma company's share price briefly fell, wiping billions in market value. The system was paused, redesigned, and relaunched in 2023.

The Advertiser Exodus

Major advertisers reacted quickly. GM, Volkswagen, Pfizer, United Airlines, IPG, and Omnicom paused or reviewed spending by late 2022. In November 2023, after Musk personally replied "You have said the actual truth" to an antisemitic conspiracy post, Disney, Apple, IBM, Comcast, and Warner Bros. Discovery pulled out within a single week. On 29 November of that year, on stage at the DealBook Summit, Musk told departed advertisers to "go fuck yourself"—at which point reconciliation became politically impossible.

Twitter's 2021 advertising revenue was about US$4.5 billion. X's 2024 advertising revenue is estimated at roughly US$2.0–2.5 billion—approximately half.

Rebrand to "X" and the xAI Merger

On 23 July 2023, Musk had the blue-bird logo removed from the San Francisco rooftop and renamed the service "X". Seventeen years of brand equity were discarded overnight; the property was folded into the x.com domain (a remnant of Musk's 1999 online bank, the predecessor to PayPal).

On 28 March 2025, Musk's AI firm xAI announced an all-stock acquisition of X. The deal valued X at US$33 billion (US$45 billion gross, less US$12 billion in debt); xAI was valued at US$80 billion; the combined entity at US$113 billion. A company bought for US$44 billion was carried on the books at US$33 billion two and a half years later—a roughly 25% nominal write-down, partly engineered to crystallise losses for the syndicate banks still holding US$13 billion of buyout debt. X's posts became training data for xAI's chatbot Grok, and Grok was woven into the timeline product.

What It Showed

The Twitter takeover demonstrated that a single individual's decision could rewrite the rulebook of a public speech platform with 250 million users—overnight. The owner of a private company, with no board oversight, no shareholder reporting, and no regulator with effective authority over content policy, could dismantle moderation, fire half the staff, and discard the brand within days.

It also exposed the fragility of the ad-supported social-media business model. Revenue halved the moment trust in the CEO collapsed. Subscription conversion (X Premium) did not close the gap. Only after the Trump administration took office in January 2025—a politically supportive environment Musk had helped engineer—did some advertisers begin to return, though revenue remained well below pre-Musk Twitter.

And one more thing. Twitter, since 2006, had invented and defined a form: microblogging. It had hosted journalism, the Arab Spring, election campaigning, sports commentary—an unofficial public square. 27 October 2022 records the moment that public square became one person's private asset.