April 25 marked the announcement of one of the largest deals in recent times: Elon Musk acquired Twitter, and the deal is valued at approximately $44B. The news stirred up not only the market but also excited ordinary people, as shown by dozens of memes that appeared on social networks.
The Stream Charts team tracked the reactions of Twitch users in Twitch chats to Elon Musk throughout the whole Twitter purchase saga.
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All of this started from a seemingly innocent joke by Elon Musk in December 2017, when he first confessed his love for Twitter, and then asked how much the service costs. As it turned out, there is some truth to every joke.
From the beginning of 2022, Elon began gradually buying Twitter shares, and by mid-March, his share of the company has reached 5%, which would oblige him to notify the authorities and, consequently, the public about this. But Musk was either accidentally or deliberately late with this action. Since otherwise, the stock would instantly skyrocket in price, such a delay allowed the head of Tesla and SpaceX to buy even more shares at a comparatively low price.
On April 4, it was unveiled that Elon Musk became the largest owner of Twitter shares. Later that evening, Twitter's chief executive invited Musk to join the company's board of directors. Musk has hinted that he is ready to sign an agreement barring him from owning more than a 14.9% stake in Twitter. Mentions of Musk in Twitch messages increased by 78% that day and by 170,5% the next day, reaching a total of 5K messages.
On April 11, it became known that Elon Musk rejected the offer to join the board of directors. What's more, it turned out that Musk has renegotiated his agreement with Twitter, enabling him to buy an unlimited number of shares in the company. However, he is not a member of the board of directors and is not obliged to act in the interests of the company. Since April 11, mentions of Elon on Twitch have increased by 50%, mentions of Twitter by 10%, and Twitter reached its weekly Peak Mentions the next day: over 114K, which is 40% more than it was before the announcement of Musk's refusal.
On April 14, Elon Musk filled out the relevant documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission and announced his intention to buy all 100% of Twitter shares at a price of $54 per share. In a word, Musk himself estimated the value of the deal at $43B. That day, the number of references to Elon Musk's name on Twitch exceeded the figure at the beginning of the week by 172,4% and reached 8.6K mentions. The identical Twitter figure reached 100.3K, which marked a 12.5% increase from the three days before.
On April 21, Musk announced that he owns the $44B necessary to buy Twitter. The next day, mentions of Twitter on the Twitch platform reached 115K.
Finally, on April 25, Elon Musk reached an agreement with the leadership of Twitter, therefore finalizing and concluding the deal. For the first time in its history, the Twitter social network has become private. The number of mentions of Elon Musk in Twitch chats went up by almost 200% compared to the previous peak figure and reached 25.9K. Meanwhile, the mention of Twitter exceeded the peak figure of the previous month by 7% and amounted to 122.4K.
Thus, there were three main peaks of the popularity of this newsbreak on Twitch. The day Musk's stake was announced on Twitter, the day Elon was going to buy Twitter, and finally, the biggest popularity leap occurred on the day of the deal itself.
It is worth noting that the graphs of mentions of Elon Musk and Twitter do not always coincide, and sometimes a decrease in mentions of Elon Musk is not accompanied by an identical decrease in mentions of Twitter. This is mostly because the “Twitter” keyword itself is oftentimes present in the texts of mailing lists of different channels – such messages are regularly sent by bots specially configured to promote certain channels. This trend was clearly seen among the most active users that mentioned Twitter: occupying the top 16 in terms of the number of messages are various kinds of chatbots.