'Did China gain leverage over the town square?' Jeff Bezos on Twitter deal

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Tuesday questioned the Chinese government's leverage over Twitter after Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired the microblogging platform for $44 billion.

In a series of tweets, Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, asks, "Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?"

This was in response to a tweet by Mike Forsythe, a reporter with The New York Times, who said that China was Tesla’s second-biggest market in 2021 after the U.S. and Chinese battery makers are major suppliers for Tesla EVs.

Bezos, however, says that his own answer to this question is probably not. "The more likely outcome in this regard is complexity in China for Tesla, rather than censorship at Twitter," a tweet by the billionaire reads. "But we’ll see. Musk is extremely good at navigating this kind of complexity."

Twitter on Monday announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at around $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.

As part of the deal, Twitter shareholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Musk disclosed his 9.1% stake in Twitter.

The Tesla CEO has secured a financing commitment of $46.5 billion to acquire Twitter. Musk has secured $25.5 billion of fully committed debt and margin loan financing and is providing an approximately $21 billion equity commitment.

"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," Musk said after the deal was announced. "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."

The transaction, which has been unanimously approved by the Twitter board of directors, is expected to close in 2022, subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders and the receipt of applicable regulatory approvals.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has welcomed the acquisition of the microblogging platform by an entity owned by Elon Musk, saying the Tesla CEO's goal of creating a platform that is "maximally trusted and broadly inclusive" is the right one.

"In principle, I don't believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness," Dorsey said.