Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the richest man in the world has just taken a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the company’s biggest shareholder. Bloomberg revealed that Musk’s stake in Twitter, which is worth about $2.89 billion, was announced today in a regulatory filing.

As of this writing, Twitter shares soared more than 28% after Musk became the biggest investor in the company. The Tesla CEO is a pretty heavy Twitter user himself with 80.2 million followers and 17.3K tweets published since he joined the platform back in 2009.

Despite his billionaire status, Musk, who is now 50, is known for his pretty unconventional use of social media, with many of his tweets including jokes, memes, or other not-so-subtle messages. Last week, Musk may have actually teased his upcoming Twitter investment with a pretty serious poll about freedom of speech on Twitter. “The consequences of this poll will be important,” the Tesla CEO emphasized at the time.

The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 25, 2022

In a series of tweets published the following day, Musk said that Twitter, which he described as “the de facto public town square,” was undermining democracy by “failing to adhere to free speech principles.” Musk followed up by asking if “a new platform” was needed, even though the tech veteran probably knew that trying to compete with established social media platform was almost impossible.

It’s not clear yet what kind of influence Musk is going to have over Twitter going forward. The microblogging platform hasn’t been growing or innovating as fast as its competitors in the social space in recent years, and many users have also been complaining about the company having the wrong priorities.

For a while, Twitter kept changing its APIs to make it harder for developers to build third-party Twitter clients, though the company finally changed course two years ago. However, Twitter is still being stubborn about editing tweets, which has been a top-requested feature for many years. The company even made an April Fools’ joke about it last week, which was (no surprise) poorly received.

Tagged with Twitter