Mr Elon Musk has closed the deal to take Twitter private. It's a forty four billion dollar transaction, and now a number of top executives will be leaving the company. We want to unpack this very briefly with our Ed Ludlow, who is Bloomberg's West Coast correspondent. Ed always a pleasure. Saga is a bit of an understatement here. I mean, this was just unbelievable. It's a done deal. Many people thought it would get done at a lower price. That didn't happen. Forty four billion is what he set out
to do originally. Where do we go from here? Hey, you read the intro. What's happening? Um? You know the mechanics of it? Are you know that each shareholder of note for Twitter will get fifty four dollars and twenty cents for each share that they held. I mean that's important to state. Um, you know. The big headline this evening is not so much that the deal has closed.
It's the top four executives at Twitter have left the company. Paragagwel, the CEO, Ned Siegel, the CFO, Viget Gadda, who is basically chief legal and policy officer, and then Sewan Eedgett, who was very senior legal counsel. Um. You know this this is the new era, right wit are under mask and you know we can talk about kind of what
will change on the platform and the company. But you know, we've had a good sense throughout Thursday here in San Francisco that this deal was basically done anyway, The paperwork has been been completed for a number of hours now and it was just a matter of time. How can we be certain about what their platform is going to
look like going forward? I mean we have Elon Musk giving a reassurance to advertisers earlier that Twitter is not going to become a forall hellscape another colorful turn of phrase. But he wants to project free speech where recent history suggests that squaring that circle might be challenging. Are we going to see President Trump returned so many unanswered questions? Yeah? I think the the important thing to say is that there was a reason that Musk to to take Twitter private? Right?
Why by Twitter? You know, we've learned throughout this saga, and it has been a six month saga that Musk was worried about the box issue on the platform. We know that Musk was kind of believes that Twitter has this big societal influence despite its relative small user base. You know, we're talking about two hundred fifty million daily users. But you know, when you compare it to say a Facebook,
for example, the user base is much bigger. Um. But he felt he couldn't make the changes that he thought were necessary to improve Twitter and to safeguard what's good about it without taking the company private. So that's done now. Um, there are there are some concrete things he's proposed, right, open sourcing the algorithm, so there's more transparency. The user can understand why a tweet appears in the thigh line in the timeline the way that it does, in the
position that it does. Um, you know, go ahead, Sorry, well, no to that point. I mean, I was reading that he Musk has asked engineers from Tesla to meet with some of the folks over Twitter on the software side. I mean that this is the thin end of the wedge, isn't it. It is? Yeah, Kurt Wagon and I broke that story earlier today. I mean, um, well, part of that story is that Elon Musk does not know everything right, and he needs to understand very quickly how Twitter the
platform is built. My understanding is that lots of Twitter engineers and products leads were literally buddied up with some Tesla engineering talent and they sat down together and taught them how the code the powers Twitter works, which is an astonishing thing to say out loud, to be honest with you. Um, but that's the reality of where we are. We know that Musk has been in the building in San Francisco in the last twenty four hours talking to staff. Um,
I'll go to your Trump point. You know, Musk has actually been pretty clear on where he stands on the future of Twitter. He does not believe in outright bands on the platform. He believes in time else So if you make a polity breach or if you say something that is harmful, rather than blocking or cancer closing your account permanently, he thinks you should be suspended for a limited period of time. He said that he would bring Trump back to the platform. Um, so let's see if
it happens. We we don't know. Um, you know, I think there's also the model. Right. What we heard from Musk in this open letter to advertisers this morning, which you reference, is that of Twitter's revenue comes from advertising, right, He's not just going to do away with that overnight, but he has floated different business models, including subscriptions to
sort of premium tier access to certain Twitter users. If you want to see somebody's premium content, and you know you want to follow me out at Ludlow and see whatever I'm reporting, then he's flowed the idea of paying
for the privilege of that. Um So, I'd be curious to get your your read on what he does down the road, but we're not going to have time to unpack that and whether he then brings it back into a some kind of publicly traded company at some point and tries to realize a premium for the time that he has spent reorganizing this company. Ed, good stuff. Thank you so much for being with us, Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow, our West Coast correspondent,