Elon Musk is adding Twitter to a titanic business portfolio that also includes Tesla and SpaceX. 

Twitter announced Monday that it has reached an agreement for Musk — the richest man in the world, according to Forbes — to acquire the company for about $44 billion.

"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 in a statement announcing the deal. "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."

So what will a Musk takeover mean for the future of Twitter? 

Here are some ways the platform could change:

Less censorship

One of Musk’s main gripes about Twitter is its content moderation policies, which he believes are too stringent.

In a regulatory finding in which he announced his bid to buy Twitter, Musk wrote: “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.”

He added he didn't trust Twitter’s leadership to make the changes he thinks are necessary to ensure free speech on the platform.

He’s not alone in complaining about Twitter’s policies. Republicans have long complained that social media companies, namely Twitter and Facebook, censor conservative viewpoints.

Musk has tweeted that he believes a social media platform’s policies “are good if the most extreme 10 percent on the left and right are equally unhappy.”

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, however, have found that, while Twitter has suspended Republicans at a rate four times higher than Democrats, Republican Twitter users also shared substantially more provably false misinformation and conspiracy theories. 

“Critically, we found that users’ misinformation sharing was as predictive of suspension as was their political orientation,” the researchers wrote. “Thus, the observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in its suspension practices. Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation.” 

Musk’s free-speech views have many wondering if he’ll allow former President Donald Trump to return to Twitter. Trump was booted from the platform two days after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The company cited “the risk of further incitement of violence,” saying that the then-president’s tweets after the riot were being interpreted by some of his supporters as calls for “to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021.”

In an industry plagued by misinformation, hate speech, harassment and election interference, Musk’s pursuit of a free-speech social media platform might be filled with more pitfalls than he realizes.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he “didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences” of the platform before Twitter was forced to tighten its moderation practices. In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook as a champion of free speech, but it, too, has since cracked down on misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election and also suspended Trump.

Even Trump’s own new Twitter-like platform, Truth Social — which claims to encourage “open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology” — prohibits posts that are false or misleading. It also has been criticized for censoring users, including Trump ally Roger Stone and a web developer whose username poked fun at the platform’s CEO, former U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes.

Trump told Fox News on Monday that he will not rejoin Twitter and will instead begin using Truth Social in the coming days.

"I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH," Trump told the outlet, adding: "I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH."

A private company

As part of the agreement, Musk will transform Twitter from a publicly traded company into a private one. 

He said in a letter to Twitter that going private was needed for the company “to go through the changes that need to be made.” He’s also complained that, following Dorsey’s departure, Twitter’s board members own few shares among them and therefore “are simply not aligned with shareholders.”

Musk, however, said he wants to keep as many shareholders in a privatized Twitter as he legally can.

Open-source algorithm

Musk said at a TED conference earlier this month that he wants to convert Twitter to an open-source model. That, he said, would create transparency into the company, allowing users to examine its code and see why certain posts are prioritized in users’ feeds. 

Musk said Twitter posts currently are being “mysteriously promoted or demoted with no insight into what’s going on.” 

“Having a black box algorithm promote some things and not other things, I think this can be quite dangerous,” he said.

Such a move would also help Twitter defend itself against allegations of political bias.

Crackdown on bots and scams

Musk also indicated recently he would try to root out bots and crypto “scams” on Twitter.

“If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!” he tweeted last week.

In January, Musk complained that Twitter was developing profile pictures that showcase non-fungible tokens “while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?”

When a Twitter user responding to one of Musk’s tweets showing a graph chart of the platform’s annual growth, Musk responded: “Now subtract crypto scam accounts that twitter constantly shows as ‘real’ people in everyone’s feed.”

An edit button

Earlier this month, Musk asked his followers if Twitter should add an edit button, jokingly listing the options as “yse” and “on.” Seventy-four percent supported the idea.

Musk, however, wouldn’t solely be able to take credit for such a move. 

Twitter said April 1 it was working on an edit button, which many users believed was an April Fool’s joke. After Musk’s poll, the company confirmed it will begin to test the button in the coming months, adding, “no, we didn’t get the idea from a poll.”