Twitter: Elon Musk to buy social media giant

Billionaire Elon Musk is to buy the social media platform Twitter for £34 billion.

Musk is the CEO of Space-X and electric car company Tesla and is believed to be the world's richest man.

He made the bid to take over Twitter less than two weeks ago.

Mr Musk says he wants to makes changes to the social media platform including relaxing content restrictions and getting rid of fake accounts.

He also said he wanted to do more to get rid of fake accounts and spam bots - automated programs that pretend to be real accounts and spread junk content.

It's unclear what will happen to the rules of the site when Mr Musk takes over but he has spoken about giving users the ability to write longer posts and to edit posts they've already published.

With over 80 million followers on Twitter, Mr Musk has also had problems on the social media site himself, which includes being taken to court for writing things about other people and being criticised for putting important investor information on Twitter about his companies.

Mr Musk supports less moderation on the opinions being shared on social media sites and in letting people having more freedom to say whatever they want.

However, social media sites have been under pressure recently to do more to protect users from fake news as well as harmful content like cyber-bullying.

'Tremendous potential'

In a statement on Twitter announcing the deal, Elon Musk said: "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.

"Twitter has tremendous potential - I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."

Despite being a very successful businessman, Mr Musk says he's not bothered about how much money Twitter makes and, although lots of influential people use it, the growth in the overall number of users of the site is slowing down and the company rarely makes any profit.