The purchase makes Musk Twitter’s largest shareholder
Elon Musk has sent Twitter shares soaring by 25 percent after he purchased a $2.89bn (£2.20bn) stake in the social media site.
According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the billionaire bought 73,486,938 Twitter shares on 14 March.
The Tesla founder is yet to publicly comment on the purchase.
The Telegraph reports that on Friday afternoon, Twitter’s share price closed at $39.30. But this had soared to $50.60 in pre-market open trading on Monday.
The purchase of the shares makes Musk Twitter’s largest shareholder, ahead of the platform’s founder Jack Dorsey who has a 2 percent stake in the business.
The move comes just days after he had openly questioned whether Twitter encouraged free speech or not, asking his 80 million followers whether a “new platform” is needed.
Is a new platform needed?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2022
Two days before this, he tweeted about being “worried about de facto bias in ‘the Twitter algorithm’ having a major effect on public discourse.”
And on March 25 he tweeted that “free speech is essential to a functioning democracy”, and polled his followers on whether they thought “Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle”.
The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 25, 2022
He bought the shares in the platform before these tweets.
Musk is no stranger to some controversy on Twitter. Last October he got into a dispute with the UN World Food Programme (WFP) after its head said that just 2 percent of Musk’s wealth could help solve world hunger.
In response to this, Musk tweeted that he would sell $6bn in Tesla stock and donate it to the WFP if it could prove “exactly how $6bn will solve world hunger”.
If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2021
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