Elon Musk is buying Twitter

On Tuesday, representatives of the billionaire notified Twitter through a letter that he intends to move forward with the tumultuous deal, confirming earlier reports that things were back on track.

Musk and Twitter were headed to court over the deal, with the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive claiming that Twitter had misled him over the number of bots that existed on the social network. Without providing evidence of his claims, Musk has alleged that as much as 20% of Twitter's user base consisted of fake/spam accounts. Twitter has long maintained that less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users - a subset of its user base provided as a metric for advertisers - are bots. However, it now seems that Musk no longer intends to press the issue.

Late Tuesday, Musk tweeted that buying Twitter would provide an accelerant to a different project altogether, X, the everything app. Musk's mysterious software grand plan is probably news to everyone on either side of the deal, though he did previously say he'd launch a social media site called X if the Twitter plan fell through. While the mention of turning X into its own app is new, Musk has a history with the letter well before Tesla released the Model X. One of Musk's first big wins as an entrepreneur was when his online bank, x.com, merged with another company to create PayPal Holdings in 2000.