Elon Musk reached an agree­ment to buy Twit­ter for rough­ly $44 bil­lion on Mon­day, promis­ing a more le­nient touch to polic­ing con­tent on the plat­form where he pro­motes his in­ter­ests, at­tacks crit­ics and opines on so­cial and eco­nom­ic is­sues to more than 83 mil­lion fol­low­ers.

The out­spo­ken Tes­la CEO, who is al­so the world’s wealth­i­est per­son, has said he want­ed to buy and pri­va­tize Twit­ter be­cause he thinks it’s not liv­ing up to its po­ten­tial as a plat­form for free speech.

Musk said in a joint state­ment with Twit­ter that he wants to make the ser­vice “bet­ter than ever” with new fea­tures, such as get­ting rid of au­to­mat­ed “spam bots” and mak­ing its al­go­rithms open to the pub­lic to in­crease trust.

“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,” he said.

The deal was ce­ment­ed rough­ly two weeks af­ter the bil­lion­aire first re­vealed a 9 per­cent stake in the plat­form. Musk said last week that he had lined up $46.5 bil­lion in fi­nanc­ing to buy Twit­ter, putting pres­sure on the com­pa­ny’s board to ne­go­ti­ate a deal.

Twit­ter said the trans­ac­tion was unan­i­mous­ly ap­proved by its board of di­rec­tors. The 11-mem­ber board in­cludes Twit­ter co-founder and for­mer CEO Jack Dorsey, who has been plan­ning to step down from the board in May. Twit­ter said the deal is ex­pect­ed to close some­time this year and is sub­ject to the ap­proval of Twit­ter stock­hold­ers and reg­u­la­tors.

Shares of Twit­ter Inc. rose 6% Mon­day to $52 per share. On April 14, Musk an­nounced an of­fer to buy the so­cial me­dia plat­form for $54.20 per share. While the stock is up sharply since Musk made his of­fer, it is well be­low the high of $77 per share it reached in Feb­ru­ary 2021.

Musk has de­scribed him­self as a “free-speech ab­so­lutist” but is al­so known for block­ing or dis­parag­ing oth­er Twit­ter users who ques­tion or dis­agree with him.

In re­cent weeks, he has voiced a num­ber of pro­posed changes for the com­pa­ny, from re­lax­ing its con­tent re­stric­tions — such as the rules that sus­pend­ed for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s ac­count — to rid­ding the plat­form of fake and au­to­mat­ed ac­counts, and shift­ing away from its ad­ver­tis­ing-based rev­enue mod­el.

Asked dur­ing a re­cent TED talk if there are any lim­its to his no­tion of “free speech,” Musk said Twit­ter or any fo­rum is “ob­vi­ous­ly bound by the laws of the coun­try that it op­er­ates in. So ob­vi­ous­ly there are some lim­i­ta­tions on free speech in the US, and, of course, Twit­ter would have to abide by those rules.”

Be­yond that, though, he said he’d be “very re­luc­tant” to delete things and in gen­er­al be cau­tious about per­ma­nent bans.

It won’t be per­fect, Musk added, “but I think we want it to re­al­ly have the per­cep­tion and re­al­i­ty that speech is as free as rea­son­ably pos­si­ble.”

Twit­ter had ini­tial­ly en­act­ed an an­ti-takeover mea­sure known as a poi­son pill that could make a takeover at­tempt pro­hib­i­tive­ly ex­pen­sive. But the board de­cid­ed to ne­go­ti­ate af­ter Musk up­dat­ed his pro­pos­al last week to show he had se­cured fi­nanc­ing, ac­cord­ing to The Wall Street Jour­nal.

While Twit­ter’s user base of more than 200 mil­lion re­mains much small­er than those of ri­vals such as Face­book and Tik­Tok, the ser­vice is pop­u­lar with celebri­ties, world lead­ers, jour­nal­ists and in­tel­lec­tu­als. Musk him­self is a pro­lif­ic tweet­er with a fol­low­ing that ri­vals sev­er­al pop stars in the ranks of the most pop­u­lar ac­counts.

Last week, he said in doc­u­ments filed with U.S. se­cu­ri­ties reg­u­la­tors that the mon­ey would come from Mor­gan Stan­ley and oth­er banks, some of it se­cured by his huge stake in Tes­la.

Musk is the world’s wealth­i­est per­son, ac­cord­ing to Forbes, with a near­ly $279 bil­lion for­tune. But much of his mon­ey is tied up in Tes­la stock — he owns about 17% of the elec­tric car com­pa­ny, ac­cord­ing to Fact­Set, which is val­ued at more than $1 tril­lion — and SpaceX, his pri­vate­ly held space com­pa­ny. It’s un­clear how much cash Musk has.

Musk be­gan mak­ing his for­tune in 1999 when he sold Zip2, an on­line map­ping and busi­ness di­rec­to­ry, to Com­paq for $307 mil­lion. He used his share to cre­ate what would be­come Pay­Pal, an in­ter­net ser­vice that by­passed banks and al­lowed con­sumers to pay busi­ness­es di­rect­ly. It was sold to eBay for $1.5 bil­lion in 2002.

That same year, Musk found­ed Space Ex­plo­ration Tech­nolo­gies, or SpaceX, af­ter find­ing that cost con­straints were lim­it­ing NASA’s in­ter­plan­e­tary trav­el. The com­pa­ny even­tu­al­ly de­vel­oped cost-ef­fec­tive reusable rock­ets.

In 2004, Musk was court­ed to in­vest in Tes­la, then a start­up try­ing to build an elec­tric car. Even­tu­al­ly he be­came CEO and led the com­pa­ny to as­tro­nom­i­cal suc­cess as the world’s most valu­able au­tomak­er and largest sell­er of elec­tric ve­hi­cles.

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Kr­ish­er re­port­ed from De­troit. O’Brien re­port­ed from Prov­i­dence, R.I. AP Busi­ness Writer Kelvin Chan re­port­ed from Lon­don.

SOURCE: AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS