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(LifeSiteNews) – Tech mogul Elon Musk’s purchase of social media giant Twitter is back on, in yet another reversal following months of conflict over the true value of the company.

Twitter first announced the $44 billion sale in April, weeks after Musk, a vocal critic of speech discrimination by digital platforms, revealed his intentions to buy the platform, eliciting a wave of hyperbolic reactions from left-wing users. In the following weeks, however, the Tesla and SpaceX chief began making moves to pull out of the deal, claiming that bot accounts inflated the count of Twitter’s actual user base, and by extension its worth.

The reversal dashed many conservatives’ hopes that new management of Twitter would bring a renewed commitment to free speech on the platform, but CNBC reported Tuesday that Musk renewed his offer to purchase the company at $54.20 per share, and Twitter has agreed.

“Twitter shares closed up more than 22% on the news,” the report adds. “A deal could happen as soon as Friday, sources told CNBC.” Voice of America adds that while Twitter’s board of directors voted this week to accept the deal, it still needs to be cleared by Twitter’s shareholders, as well as government regulators.

But in the meantime, the news prevents having to go through a legal battle over the original deal, which had been slated to go to trial on October 17.

Musk also says that he sees owning Twitter as a boon to his longer-term vision of developing a so-called “everything app” called X. “It’s a pretty, pretty grand vision,” he said. “Now obviously, that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years. So it’s kind of like something I thought would be useful for a long time.” 

Most of the interest over the move stems from its ramifications for Twitter’s content moderation policies. Twitter, Facebook, and other major online information and communication platforms have since 2016 grown more aggressive in down-ranking and suppressing political speech at odds with their left-wing politics, most infamously on the COVID-19 debate, election integrity, damaging stories on Democrat candidates, and transgenderism.

Among Musk’s reported plans to reform Twitter are a more neutral and hands-off approach to user speech, a crackdown on spam and bot accounts, and making its algorithm public in the interest of transparency, which has generated widespread panic among the political beneficiaries of Twitter’s current policies:

In fact, the changes could actually start before Musk actually institutes any. “[V]irtually every Twitter employee I’ve spoken to in the last six months has told me that he or she plans to leave if Mr. Musk takes over,” the New York Times’ Tom Gara reports.

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