Twitter sold to Elon Musk for $44B despite initial rejections

Global News shows the Elon Musk news.

First, it was PayPal, then it was electric cars, and then space. Now, Elon Musk's next frontier is social media. 

Despite initially thwarting a hostile takeover from the world's richest man, Twitter has now struck a $44-billion deal with the CEO and co-founder of both Tesla and SpaceX. 

He will become the social media giant's sole owner. 

Abigail Bimman explains Musk's promises to make the platform "better than ever," and how his controversial reputation raises questions on what that could mean.

Twitter is really an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read those that are publicly available. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs. Prior to April 2020, services were accessible via SMS. The service is provided by Twitter, Inc., a corporation based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the whole world. So-called Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but the limit was doubled to 280 for non-CJK languages in November 2017. Audio and video tweets remain limited to 140 seconds for most accounts.

Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users. In practice, the vast majority of tweets are written by a minority of users.

On April 25, 2022, the Twitter board of directors certainly agreed to a $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, potentially making it one of the biggest deals to turn a company private.

Twitter Stock price: TWTR (NYSE) US$49.11 -  Apr 28, 4:02 p.m. EDT

It seems that now Twitter is adding an "edit button." Until this year, Twitter hasn't allowed its users to edit tweets.

Twitter has really announced that it's working to allow users to edit their tweets after posting them. The idea is that you'll be able to fix any typos or errors in a tweet without sacrificing any replies, retweets, or likes it's already accrued.