When Did Elon Musk Buy Twitter? The Complete Acquisition Timeline

Elon Musk officially closed the acquisition of Twitter on Thursday, October 27, 2022, taking the company private for approximately $44 billion at a share price of $54.20. He took control the same evening, immediately fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and legal chief Vijaya Gadde, and famously walked into headquarters carrying a kitchen sink ("let that sink in").

Nine months later, on July 23, 2023, he rebranded the platform from Twitter to X. See the full Twitter timeline for context on what he inherited.

Musk began quietly buying Twitter shares in January 2022. By early April he had accumulated a 9.2% stake, disclosed in an SEC filing on April 4, 2022 — making him Twitter's largest individual shareholder overnight. The stock jumped 27% on the news.

Twitter's board initially offered Musk a board seat, which he accepted, then rejected within days. The rejection was the tell: a board seat comes with a 14.9% ownership cap, and Musk clearly wanted more than that.

On April 14, 2022, Musk made an unsolicited public offer to acquire Twitter in full for $54.20 per share, valuing the company at roughly $44 billion. The "$54.20" figure was a marijuana reference (Musk had used the "$420" joke before with Tesla).

Twitter's board immediately activated a "poison pill" — a shareholder rights plan that would flood the market with cheap shares if Musk crossed 15% ownership, diluting his stake. The pill wasn't a rejection; it was a negotiating tactic.

On April 25, 2022, the board accepted Musk's offer at the original price after he lined up $46 billion in financing (equity, debt, and margin loans against Tesla stock).

In May 2022, Musk claimed the deal was "on hold" pending verification that fewer than 5% of Twitter accounts were bots. Twitter's disclosed figure was under 5%; Musk argued the real number was 20%+ and that this was a material misrepresentation.

On July 8, 2022, Musk formally notified Twitter he was terminating the merger agreement. Twitter sued the next week in the Delaware Court of Chancery to enforce the deal at the agreed $54.20 price — a rare "specific performance" lawsuit.

Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick scheduled a five-day trial to begin October 17, 2022. In pre-trial discovery, Twitter's lawyers extracted damaging Musk text messages showing that his interest in the deal was largely unrelated to bot counts. Musk's own bankers testified that the financing was still in place.

On October 4, 2022, Musk reversed course and told Twitter he would close at the original $54.20 price — dropping the bot-count argument entirely — provided the litigation was paused. The Court gave him until October 28 to close.

On the evening of October 27, 2022, wires were transferred and Musk took private control of Twitter. He walked into headquarters carrying a sink (captioning the video "Let that sink in — Chief Twit"). Within hours he had fired the top four executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal.

Trading in TWTR stock was suspended before the open on October 28, 2022, and Twitter delisted from the NYSE. The company disappeared as a public entity that morning. The "chief twit" sink video is still one of the most-downloaded X clips of all time — grab your own copy with our HD video downloader.

The post-acquisition period reshaped the company almost immediately:

• Nov 4, 2022. Roughly 50% of Twitter's ~7,500 staff laid off in a single day.
• Nov 5, 2022. Twitter Blue relaunched at $8/month — including the blue checkmark, previously a free verification badge.
• April 20, 2023. Legacy verification was fully removed, ending the "notable person" free blue check era.
• July 23, 2023. The Twitter brand was retired. The bird logo was replaced with the X wordmark, and the domain became x.com. That entire "final bird post" thread is still fetchable in one shot via our bulk downloader for archivists.
• 2024–2026. The platform pivoted toward long-form posts, live video, creator monetization, and payments infrastructure.

Whether Musk's $44B valuation was too high remains the debate of the decade — internal valuations in 2023–2024 marked X well below $20B by some estimates, though the platform's cultural role continues to eclipse its financials.

The headline number was $44B in equity value. Layered on top were roughly $13B in debt loaded onto the acquired entity (paid by Twitter's cash flows, not Musk personally) and $33B in equity, of which Musk contributed a mix of cash, Tesla-stock margin loans, and co-investor equity from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, and others.

The deal is now taught in business schools as the archetype of an "overpaying then trying to renegotiate" acquisition — and as a landmark in Delaware M&A law, since the Chancery Court's willingness to enforce specific performance changed how future hostile deals are negotiated. For the operational aftermath — including whether all this chaos is why X keeps having outages — see our is-X-down guide.