So, he did it. On April 25, Elon Musk reached a deal with Twitter to buy the company for roughly $44 billion at $54.20 per share, a 38 percent premium over the company's share price before he said he was the company's biggest shareholder. The company will now become private.

Musk said in a statement, "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated." He added, "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."

If Musk follows through, the algorithm will be open source; there won't be spam; and everyone will be authenticated. Open source algorithms and no spam would be positive changes. Authenticating everyone sounds good but it could pose problems for critics in autocratic regimes. Users in Russia and China who evade government bans via Virtual Private Networks have good reasons to remain anonymous and unauthenticated.

One prediction seems likely to come true -- Donald Trump will be back on the platform, giving him a huge boost in his quest to return to office in 2025.

Musk hasn't publicly commented on Twitter's permanent ban of the former president. However, he appears inclined to rescind it. He said that he wanted to be "very cautious" with permanent bans, and preferred "timeouts" -- locking a user out of their Twitter account for a period of time.

It's possible that Musk will put Trump on a "timeout." And it's true that the existing Twitter leadership would have been under tremendous pressure to lift the ban without the sale during the 2024 presidential cycle. However, now the decision is Musk's alone to make -- and it seems like he would want to do so, given that he describes himself as a "free speech absolutist."

Trump has said that he doesn't want to go back on Twitter, telling Fox News that he'll stay on his own Truth Social platform. “I am going to stay in Truth,” he said on April 25, referring to the platform that his company created that is struggling to draw users and attention. 

It's hard to take Trump's statement at face value. He needs Twitter to remain politically relevant. The platform gave him the opportunity to drive countless news cycles. The cycle would go like this: he would tweet an attack at someone; the tweets would be amplified on cable; the targets of his tweets would respond; Trump would repeat the charge or give a mom-made-me apology; rinse, repeat. Without it, his megaphone is tiny. According to the analytics firm Social Flow, since leaving office and being banned from Twitter, clicks on Trump news stories dropped from over 4 million to over 100,000 in October 2021. (It's true that Trump was being written about less out of office, but stories about him got less traffic than before.)  

Other banned individuals, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and various right-wing extremists, hoped Musk would bring their accounts back. The ball is in Musk's court now. Musk remaking Twitter as a "free speech" bastion likely means that it will become a free-for-all. 

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