Elon Musk has become the largest shareholder of Twitter after an SEC filing revealed that he now holds a 9.2% passive stake in the social networking platform. The Tesla CEO owns 73,486,938 shares out of a total of 800,641,166 Twitter shares.
Update [05/04/22]: Elon Musk joins Twitter’s board, limiting his potential stake to 14.9%
Twitter’s shares rose about 25% in the premarket, with prices shooting up to $49.09, up from $39.31.
The founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, holds 2.25% of Twitter’s stake, and according to Bloomberg, Musk’s 9.2% makes him the largest shareholder in Twitter.
Elon Musk is one of the most influential people on Twitter, with over 80 million followers. People have been speculating about him creating a Twitter rival or acquiring Twitter for weeks, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Musk has been fueling these conversations.
On March 24, he tweeted that the Twitter algorithm’s bias affects public discourse and received a reply from Dorsey, who tweeted, “The choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone”.
Following up on his earlier tweet on March 26, Musk said, “Is a new platform needed?” In another follow-up on March 27, he tweeted, “Am giving serious thought to this”.
Given the amount of criticism Elon Musk doles out frequently to Twitter, it won’t be surprising if the tech titan decides to take matters into his own hands.
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