So by now you've heard: Twitter's board caved and Elon Musk is buying the company for something like $44 billion. Every outlet on my RSS list (yes I still use RSS, don't @ me) ran some version of the same headline yesterday and this morning, and I don't really feel like writing another one of those posts. If you want the full timeline there are about four hundred other sites that will give it to you in more detail than I care to.
What I can't stop thinking about instead is the actual number. $54.20 per share. Say it out loud. Fifty-four twenty. That's not a coincidence, and it's kind of wild that a publicly traded company's board signed off on a deal priced around a joke.
Here's the thing that makes it more than just a dumb bit: this isn't the first time Musk has done this. Back in August 2018 he tweeted that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 a share, which turned out to be not true in any meaningful sense, and it cost him and Tesla $20 million each in SEC fines plus his chairman title. The number itself, 420, was reportedly picked partly because his girlfriend at the time thought it would be funny that he was 20% above the current stock price. That whole saga is one of the stranger footnotes in recent corporate history and I remember writing about it here at the time, half amused and half baffled that this was a real thing happening to a real company.
So now here we are, four years later, and the acquisition price for one of the most influential communication platforms on the planet has the same number baked into it, just with two extra digits tacked on. I don't think that's an accident. I think it's Musk doing the thing he does, where he treats enormous, consequential decisions with the same energy he'd use to name a SpaceX rocket after a meme. Sometimes that's charming. A lot of the time, especially when it involves securities law, it is not, and I'd bet actual money there are Twitter and Tesla lawyers somewhere quietly begging him to stop doing this.
I've had a Twitter account since 2009. Not early-early, but early enough that I remember when the character limit felt genuinely restrictive instead of like a relic, and when "fail whale" was a thing you saw more often than you wanted to. I've watched the site go through I don't know how many redesigns, several CEOs, the whole Trump ban saga, the algorithmic timeline nobody asked for that replaced the chronological one nobody wanted to lose. It has never once, in thirteen years, felt like a stable or calm place, and somehow this feels like it's going to be the least stable chapter yet, which is really saying something.
What strikes me watching the reaction today isn't even the split between people cheering and people threatening to delete their accounts (nobody's actually deleting their accounts, let's be honest, myself included). It's how many people are treating this like it's already decided and finished, when there's still a shareholder vote, regulatory review, and Musk's own history of losing interest in things he's said he'd definitely do. He walked toward the Twitter board seat in early April and then walked away from it days later. This has been a fast-moving few weeks and I don't think fast-moving automatically means done.
Jack Dorsey, who's been mostly quiet on the site since stepping down as CEO, popped up yesterday to say something to the effect that Musk is "the singular solution" he trusts, which is a strange thing to read from a guy who co-founded the company and clearly still has feelings about where it ended up. I don't know what to make of that endorsement exactly. Coming from almost anyone else it would read as a normal statement of support. Coming from Dorsey it reads like there's a longer, more complicated story underneath it that we're not getting.
Anyway. I'll keep my account open, I'll keep complaining about the timeline like I always have, and I'll probably write about this again in a few months once there's something more concrete to say than "look at this funny number."