Big news: Elon Musk has purchased Twitter for 44 Billion US dollars! This is the biggest news directly impacting the US since the mask lift, which was a while ago.

Elon Musk has co-founded PayPal, Tesla Motors, and DeepMind Technologies, and founded SpaceX and the Boring Company. Now, he owns Twitter too. While you might not have heard of DeepMind Technologies or the Boring Company, there’s a highly likely chance you’ve heard of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and a decent chance you might even use PayPal and/or Twitter.

Regardless, Musk’s making a name for himself online right now after his purchase of Twitter. He’s jumped over Jeff Bezos in the past year to become the richest person in the world by net worth, which is an extreme accomplishment.

But let’s put this purchase into comparison. How much exactly is $44B? I mean, it’s definitely a lot. That’s more than 100 average households will make in a lifetime in one purchase. But, how does $44B compare to other massive purchases, like Marvel?

Turns out, it’s a lot indeed. While not as much as the massive $71.3B that 20th Century Fox was purchased for, but certainly more than the $4.05B purchase price of Lucasfilm, and Instagram’s measly $1B when it was bought, both in 2012. Marvel Entertainment was purchased for just under Lucasfilm at $4B in 2009, and Whole Foods was bought for $13.7B by Amazon in 2017. 

It might just be me, but it is somewhat surprising that Twitter is 11x more valuable than Marvel. Well, not really, due to the values being taken at different points in money value, but still, that is a massive difference from a big movie and comic producer to a place to chit chat with your friends that is free to use. And Lucasfilm, with six movies and a spin-off Clone Wars series, was only worth $4.05B ten years ago? I know inflation hasn’t turned 4 Billion to 44 Billion in just that much time.

So yeah, Twitter’s really valuable. It’s going to be interesting to see how the platform changes now that Musk is ultimately in charge.

Photo Credit: CNBC.com