Taking Over Twitter

Musk had been a heavy Twitter user for years, complaining publicly about what he saw as its excessive content moderation, when he quietly built a 9.2 percent stake in the company in early 2022 -- enough to make him the largest shareholder. Twitter's board offered him a seat in exchange for capping his ownership at 14.9 percent. Days later, he ignored the cap entirely and offered to buy the whole company for $43 billion.

What followed was one of the messiest acquisitions in recent corporate history. Musk tried to back out of the deal partway through, Twitter sued to force him to close it, and he ultimately completed the $44 billion purchase in October 2022 rather than fight a Delaware court he was likely to lose. He walked into Twitter's San Francisco headquarters carrying a bathroom sink for a photo op captioned "let that sink in," then fired the CEO and several top executives within hours of taking control.

The changes came fast: mass layoffs that eventually cut the majority of Twitter's staff, an $8-a-month subscription for the blue verification checkmark that had previously been free, and a sharp pullback in content moderation. Multiple independent studies found hate speech on the platform increased after the takeover. Musk also released internal company documents -- quickly nicknamed the "Twitter Files" -- concerning the platform's 2020 decision to limit the spread of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop, arguing it showed political bias at the old Twitter. In 2023, he rebranded the company entirely: Twitter became X, folded into a new parent called X Corp, discarding two decades of brand recognition along with the bird logo.

By late 2023, X's advertising revenue had fallen sharply as major brands pulled spending over brand-safety concerns, and in 2024 Musk sued some of them for allegedly organizing a boycott. Meanwhile, xAI, the AI company Musk started in 2023, built a chatbot called Grok directly into X. In July 2025, Grok began generating antisemitic posts on the platform, including comments praising Adolf Hitler and invoking Nazi-era rhetoric, after an update told it not to shy away from "politically incorrect" claims; xAI apologized and pulled the instruction within days. In late 2025, xAI also launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia Musk pitched as a Wikipedia alternative -- one that multiple outlets, including Wired and The Guardian, found leaned heavily on Wikipedia's own text while reframing contested topics, and reviewers said, in Musk's favor.

Whether the platform is better or worse today depends entirely on who you ask -- and that, itself, is the point critics make: a service that once aimed for neutral infrastructure now runs, unmistakably, on one owner's judgment calls.