Why Elon Musk is offering to buy Twitter

Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferre breaks down Tesla CEO Elon Musk's motivations and goals in purchasing Twitter after he offered to buy the social platform for $54.20 per share.

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- The story of the day, as Rachelle told you, as you all know, is Elon Musk, once again-- the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, otherwise known as the richest man in the world-- making an offer for Twitter at, yes, fittingly, $54.20 per share. He is a clever one. That values the company at $43 billion.

Reactions from all over the map. And Elon live on a TED Talk this afternoon, so we got instant reaction to this. Ines Ferre has all the latest on this ground-shaking deal. Hi there, Ines.

INES FERRE: Hi, Dave. And the interviewer at that TED conference asked him why he made the offer for Twitter, and he went into the reason why. He said basically that Twitter, he sees it as a de facto town square; that he wants an inclusive arena for free speech. And some of the changes that he said he would make, he said he would open-source the algorithm on Twitter so that it's transparent so that people can see any changes so that people understand why a tweet would be promoted or demoted.

He also said he's reluctant to permanent bans. He thinks timeouts are a better option. He also talked about the edit button, saying that the edit capability would be open for a period of time. And he said that he wants to eliminate spam and scam bots. He wants to eliminate the bot armies on Twitter.

Now, he has said before that he would want an advertising-free Twitter, a tweet-- a subscription model, so to speak. Musk said in the interview that he doesn't have all the answers, that he is open for suggestions. And he also said this isn't about making money. Take a listen.

ELON MUSK: This is not a way to sort of make money. I think this is-- it's just that I think this is-- my strong, intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.

- But you've described yourself--

ELON MUSK: I don't care about the economics at all.

INES FERRE: Now, Musk said that he technically can afford the company, but he said that he's not sure he'll be able to buy it. He was asked, is there a plan B? He said there is. He did not elaborate. He said, for another time I think.

- Yahoo Finance's own Ines Ferre. We appreciate the breakdown there.