This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on April 14th, 2022. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Elon Musk, the newly minted major shareholder in Twitter, has launched a hostile bid and wants to take the company private. The billionaire says he is doing it to safeguard free speech. The more likely draw is control over the media platform of our age.

Ten days. That is all it took for Elon Musk to go from announcing that he had become Twitter’s single largest shareholder to wanting to be its only one.

In a letter to Bret Taylor, Twitter’s chairman, he writes:

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.”

Plenty of people would agree with that. And the question of free speech is something Musk has held close for a long time. But the letter goes on:

“However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”

Imagine sitting in on the conversations with Twitter’s board and leadership during those ten days.

First Musk disclosed his share purchase, then he was joining the board, then he was not joining the board, and now this. Musk wants to take Twitter private at a premium of 38 percent over where the stock sat before he revealed he had invested.

True to form, there is an undertone of humour even in the bid itself. The share price he is offering is $54.20 — a wink to the $420 figure he used when he tried to take Tesla private in 2018 with his now-infamous tweet. 420 is also a number often associated with marijuana.

When he said he wanted to take Tesla private, he ended up in a protracted fight with the SEC, the US financial regulator. Now it is in an updated filing to that same agency that we learn about the bid for Twitter.

An accompanying text hints that the company’s leadership has not impressed Musk. Parag Agrawal, who took over as CEO from Jack Dorsey in November last year, has barely had time to settle in before being thrown into the fire.

Musk adds:

“If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.”

Even with the follow-up caveat — “this is not a threat” — it is hard to read it as anything else. If a company’s largest shareholder trashes management and says he might sell his shares if his deal doesn’t go through, there aren’t many other ways to interpret that. Given the stock jumped 25 percent on the news he had bought in, you can only imagine what would happen if he sold out again.

So why is Musk doing this? Like many in the tech world, he seems to feel free speech is under threat. He has voiced scepticism about “cancel culture” and his fight with the SEC is in large part about his own sense of being able to speak — and tweet — freely.

In these contexts the First Amendment is often invoked, the amendment to the US constitution that covers free speech. But it applies to society at large, not to private companies’ websites and apps. There is no law requiring Twitter to let anyone write anything. As owner, of course, you can set your own rules. That must be very tempting for Musk.

Billionaires buying media outlets is hardly unusual either. In 2013 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, whose slogan is “Democracy dies in darkness.” In February this year crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao invested $200 million in Forbes magazine.

Twitter is not a media company in the traditional sense, but the similarities are many. It is also one of the few social networks where the founders do not hold controlling shares. An equivalent deal with Facebook or Snap would have been nearly impossible.

The question everyone is asking now is whether the deal happens. Musk has said he is not willing to negotiate. But the price of $54.20 is not especially high given the stock was above $70 less than a year ago. Since then many tech companies have fallen hard, and Twitter has had a difficult start to the year.

What the shareholders and the board need to decide now is perhaps not whether Musk is a good owner of all of the company’s shares — but what happens if he is unwilling to own any of them.