Elon Musk is backing out of Twitter deal

We have our answer: Elon Musk will not buy Twitter.

On Friday afternoon, the (current) richest person in the world notified the SEC that he had terminated his painfully drawn-out effort to buy his favorite social media site, reportedly claiming "material breach of multiple provisions of the Agreement" as the cause. He had already previously declared the deal "on hold."

Another way of saying this would be that the owner of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla won't buy the rest of Twitter for a total of $44 billion, but he'll still own a big chunk. In April, Musk took on a 9 percent stake in the company, making him the largest individual shareholder and, later that same month, he announced he wanted to take it private by swallowing up the rest. So if the deal had gone through, it would have been Elon Musk's private company, rather than what it still is: a publicly traded corporation owned in large part by Elon Musk.

Musk had become a critic of Twitter's moderation policies in recent months, and his announcement that he wanted to buy it came with promises that he would address issues with the way the algorithm presents tweets, and make Twitter a bastion of free speech. And, yes, he was going to let former President Donald Trump rejoin the platform if he wanted.

It has been previously established that Musk can be charged a $1 billion fee to the SEC for pulling out of the deal, according to the terms of his purchase. There's no word yet on whether that money will ever be successfully extracted by the government.

Mashable reached out to Twitter for comment, and will update this story if we hear back.

This story is developing...