Twitter: Elon Musk buys social media platform for $44 billion
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The world's richest man has bought one of the most popular social media platforms in the world.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who also owns electric car company Tesla, bought Twitter yesterday for a whopping $44 billion (which is roughly £38.1 billion).
The CEO of SpaceX arrived at Twitter's headquarters earlier this week holding a bathroom sink, joking that people should "let that sink in".
He also changed his Twitter profile to say "Chief Twit".
People were quite confused when Mr Musk brought a sink into Twitter HQ
After the deal had been done, Elon Musk tweeted "the bird is freed".
Mr Musk has already made some significant changes to the company since the takeover completed, such as firing Twitter's boss Parag Agrawal.
Big decisions
Mr Musk has over 110 million followers on Twitter and counting
Elon Musk has said in the past that's he's a big fan of free speech, but some people are worried that this means he will allow hateful things to be posted on Twitter now that he's in charge.
Elon Musk said he bought the social media platform to help humanity and he wanted "civilisation to have a common digital town square".
How did we get here?
Elon Musk already owns big companies such as Space X, which builds rockets and sends people to space
Elon Musk started publicly investing money in Twitter in January 2022 - this means he started giving the company money to help it run, and in return he would get a say in decisions that are made, and money in return if the company does well.
By the middle of March, he owned 5% of Twitter.
By April, it was revealed that he owned the largest portion of the company of any of the people investing in it. It was then that he offered to buy Twitter completely.
He was born in South Africa
He was a keen coder from a young age, and made his own video game called Blastar
He inspired Robert Downey, Jr's version of Tony Stark in the Marvel films
He sent one of his Tesla cars to space
He has two children with singer Grimes called X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl Musk
He 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.
He almost changed his mind about the deal over the summer, but Twitter threatened to take him to court if he did.
So in October, he picked his plans up again.
What now?
Elon Musk hasn't said much yet about what he wants to do with the platform
While we don't know what Elon Musk's specific ideas for Twitter are yet, he did share a post on Thursday explaining what he said were his "motivations" for buying the platform.
He said he wants the platform to be a place where "a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence".
"I didn't do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love," he continued.
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