Elon Musk acquires $2.9 billion stake in Twitter; becomes company’s biggest stakeholder

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, the founder of The Boring Company, and the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI, may be launching a new company soon.

Of course, if he’s being serious……

Musk expressed his dissatisfaction with Twitter’s democratic nature in a series of tweets over the weekend, suggesting that it be changed.

“Given that Twitter is the de facto public town square, failure to adhere to free speech norms fundamentally weakens democracy,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “How should we proceed?” He then inquired about the necessity for a new platform.

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who ranks in the top ten most popular users on Twitter with more over 80 million followers, paid $2.89 billion for the stake at Twitter’s closing share price.

On the news, the company’s stock rocketed by more than a quarter in pre-market trade, adding roughly $8 billion to its $31.5 billion market value, before easing back to a 21 percent gain in early trading. Musk’s stake is now worth more than $3.5 billion as a result of the stock price increase.

Remember when Elon Musk surveyed his Twitter followers about selling 10% of his Tesla stock? That’s a good example of how serious he takes a Twitter poll.

“Is a new platform needed?” Elon Musk asked, with over 2 million votes and the majority of his followers voting “no” in the current poll, indicating that they don’t believe Twitter adheres to the principle of free expression being fundamental to a functioning democracy.

Musk accused the SEC of “harassment” and of attempting to “chill” his right to free expression in February.

As usual, it’s impossible to know how serious Musk is about any of this. Despite the fact that the CEO has operated successful software companies in the past (his first big hit was PayPal), running a social networking site is a little outside of his comfort zone.