Elon Musk is officially the new owner of Twitter. Now, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire have control over one of the most popular and used social media platforms in the world. To commemorate the buyout, Musk tweeted “the bird is freed” last Thursday. 

Many news outlets reported on Thursday that after many months of public acrimony and legal wrangling, Musk had closed the deal to purchase Twitter. He also fired a slew of top executives from the platform, including CEO Parag Agrawal. 

Last Wednesday, Musk made a brief change to his Twitter bio which now says “Chief Twit”. He then walked into Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco carrying a bathroom sink. After that, he posted the video on his page with the caption “let that sink in”. 

Now that the deal has been finalized, Twitter goes back to being a private company. Twitter shares – known as TWTR on the NY Stock Exchange – have stopped trading almost nine years after going public. 

Elon Musk first agreed to buy Twitter back in April and make it a private company before trying to end the deal. He claimed that the company was untrue in its report for the number of fake accounts, which Twitter promptly denied. 

Shortly after that, Twitter sued Musk to get him to complete the deal. Earlier in October, the billionaire offered to go through with the purchase at the original price of $54.20 per share. The trial then was delayed by a judge at the Delaware Court of Chancery to provide more window for both sides to reach an agreement. 

Earlier this month at a Tesla earnings meeting, Musk revealed he was excited about his Twitter purchase. He said that the platform has an incredible potential, and that it had been declining for a while. 

Musk predicts he’ll double Twitter’s revenue in just under three year. However, the entrepreneur has offered little specifics on how he intends to do so. Nevertheless, he did mention he would like to decrease the platform’s reliance on ads. 

Musk says that Twitter could be the key to accelerate the plans he has for an “everything app”. Taking inspiration from China’s popular WeChat, this new app would combine commerce, payments, video and messaging. 

But for now, Twitter is facing uncertainty. That is because the deal will crush Twitter with a debt of over $13 billion. According to financial experts, that will force the company to pay annual interest of over $1 billion. 

The Musk Twitter deal comes at a time when not only the platform relies heavily on advertising, but is also struggling to keep users engaged. To top it all off, there’s been a significant decline in demand for digital ads.  

That said, Musk might need to keep Twitter running with ads and look for other alternatives before he can disengage and start to put his plans for app X in action. 

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