Did Elon Musk and his Sons Meet With Pope Francis in Rome Last Week?

Elon Musk has been described has Twitter's savior, its ruination and its biggest troll. But when the account holder with over 100 million followers absented himself from the platform for almost ten days; tongues wagged. But then on July 1, Musk suddenly tweeted a photo of himself, his five sons and Pope Francis himself. "Honored to meet @Pontifex yesterday," was the simple caption.

The weird thing is, the pontiff did not have a scheduled meeting with the Tesla/ SpaceX entrepreneur. There is speculation that the photo is actually a prank of some sort, from Musk.

As early as 2017, Musk tweeted interest in buying Twitter, where he had been a user for 13 years. In January 2022, Musk began purchasing significant quantities of shares in the company, reaching a 5% stake in the company in March.

Musk reached a total of 73,115,038 shares on April 1, 9.13% of Twitter's overall shares, then valued at $2.64 billion, making him the largest shareholder.

Musk did not file the necessary paperwork to notify the SEC within 10 days of his stake passing 5%, a violation of US securities laws. When Musk publicly disclosed his investment in an SEC 13G filing on April 4, 2022, Twitter shares experienced the largest intraday surge since its 2013 IPO. The revelation that Musk had acquired a significant stake in Twitter followed Musk's March tweets in which he questioned Twitter's commitment to freedom of speech and said he was considering developing a rival social media site, although the comments were made after he had acquired 7.5% of the company, says Wikipedia

On April 4, Musk agreed to a deal that would appoint him to Twitter's board of directors and prohibit him from acquiring more than 14.9% of the company.

However, on April 13, Musk made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter, launching a takeover bid to buy 100% of Twitter's stock at $54.20 per share. In a letter to Twitter's board, he argued that a private Twitter would thrive and best advance free speech. In response, Twitter's board adopted a shareholder rights plan to make it significantly more expensive for any single investor to own more than 15% of the company without approval of the board.

A week later, Musk secured funding worth $46.5 billion,[196] which included $12.5 billion in loans against his stock in Tesla and $21 billion in equity financing. Later that day, Musk successfully concluded his bid to buy Twitter and bring the company private for approximately $44 billion.