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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, October 27,
2022. It's about 1045 in the morning here in West Texas, where I find myself today giving a speech on taking rights seriously at San Angelo State University in
conjunction with the Free Market Institute at Texas A&M run by my good friend and former student,
Professor Benjamin Powell. So I'm way in the western portion of Texas, practically in the next time zone, but not quite. When I got up this
morning, I saw in the headlines that Elon Musk is saying he's the owner of Twitter. Well, not quite.
What happened today was he received the final commitments from all of the banks to put into a
pot the $44 billion in cash that he had promised,
and a judge indicated she would order him to comply with that promise to pay the shareholders of Twitter.
When that $44 billion is distributed, and when the judge signs off on this,
then he'll be the official owner of Twitter.
So even though he's anxious to be there, and even though he showed up symbolically with a kitchen sink, I guess meaning he's throwing everything and the kitchen
sink into the pot in order to get the $44 billion, it'll take a few more days for all of this to be
official. When he decided not to go forward with the $44 billion, Twitter sued him in chancery court in Delaware.
Why Delaware? Well, because that's where Twitter is incorporated. The litigation began. Musk hired
lawyers to respond, and it wasn't going in his direction, and it appeared that he was going to
lose. So rather than go through the expense of a jury trial,
he pretty much said, okay, let me see
if I can get the 44 billion.
Of course, as a result of his hemming and hawing,
he wants it, he doesn't.
It's worth 44 billion.
It's worth more.
It's worth less.
It's worth a lot less.
It's worth 44 billion this morning
because if you buy Twitter stock
at whatever it's going for,
you're going to get
that money reimbursed by Elon Musk when he buys all the stock that's out there.
But it will be worth a lot less than what he's paying for it because he's pledging the
stock that he's acquiring as security for the money that he's using to buy the stock.
In other words, he's buying Twitter and it has no debt. Once he is officially the owner, it will be saddled with
billions and billions of debt, promises that Twitter has made to pay back the people that
loaned the money to Musk to buy Twitter, if you follow me. So the world's richest man, who's worth well over $280
billion, is having trouble turning $44 of the $280 billion into cash. And in order to do that,
he has to weaken the value of the asset that he's purchasing. So that's where we stand today. I don't blame him
for crowing. It's a happy time for freedom of speech if he follows through on what he says
he's going to do. But none of this is official until the cash actually changes hands. And it
can't actually change hands until the judge signs off on it. And she says she's not going to sign
off on it until tomorrow. So there's a bunch of dominoes that have to fall in place here. And the first of those is Musk telling the judge,
I have the cash. And Twitter's saying, he's shown us he has the cash that we withdraw the litigation.
The litigation's over. Pay us your money. Then comes, what is he going to do with Twitter? He has already begun to take a
few steps back from it'll be the marketplace for ideas saying he doesn't want extremists there.
Well, if he doesn't want extremists there, then he's going to have somebody or something,
one human being, a group of human beings, or an algorithm of some sort,
sanctioning the people that go on Twitter.
He says he doesn't want extremes. I thought he was buying Twitter because he wanted it to be
the market square, the town square for freedom of speech. And I hope he sticks with that original
proposal. I also hope, I've said this before, partially in jest and partially
seriously, I would take this offer, that he hires me as his chief content officer. Being a libertarian,
being a free speech person as I am, I wouldn't sanction anybody. We'll see. We'll see where he
goes. If it gets too extreme, if people threaten violence, if the language is utterly unacceptable in civilized society, he's probably going to clamp down on it.
But maybe he'll be his free market self as he says he wants to.
More as we get it, more as this story develops.
From West Texas, from San Angelo, Texas. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.