5 years ago Elon Musk asked the price of Twitter, now he has bought it

Elon Musk has finally bought a 100 per cent stake in microblogging site Twitter. This comes days after the CEO of Tesla, who is also the richest person on Earth, recently offered to buy the whole company for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share. But this is not the first time Musk showed interest in buying Twitter. Soon after Musk's purchase was made official, an old tweet of him showing interest in buying Twitter went viral on the microblogging website.

It seems that Twitter has been on the mind of Musk for quite a while. On December 21, 2017, Musk casually tweeted "I love Twitter". A Twitter user then suggested that Musk should simply buy the whole company, to which Musk replied "How much is it?"

The original tweet has over 1.74L likes and over 35,000 retweets and quote tweets at the time of writing this.

Nearly five years later, Musk brought up the talk of buying Twitter again. A few weeks ago, in March, Musk asked his Twitter followers if he should start a new social media company. His followers said why start something new when he could buy Twitter. After all, Musk, as the world's richest person, did seem to have enough money.

Musk took the suggestion seriously. He bought a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter, making him the second-biggest shareholder in the company. Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, in comparison, has a 2.5 per cent stake in the company. Twitter realised that something was amiss, so it offered Musk a seat on the Twitter Board. But there was a condition attached. A board member can't be allowed to take over the company. Musk refused the board seat.

Just a few days later, he proposed to purchase Twitter for nearly $44 billion, or $54.20 per share.

Musk has publicly announced that he sees immense potential in the platform and wants to unlock it by having full control over the company.

Musk, earlier today, also said that free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is a digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. He further added that he would want to make Twitter "better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating spambots, and authenticating all humans."