Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become Twitter’s largest shareholder. The tech billionaire now holds a 9.2% stake in Twitter for a value of 2,890 million dollars — based on the value of the share after the close of the market last Friday.
The news is learned after the filing of the 13G documentation to the SEC, in compliance with market regulations that require any individual or group of individuals to disclose a stake of more than 5% of the outstanding shares of a company.
In this way, Elon Musk becomes the largest shareholder of Twitter, ahead of the Vanguard group (8.79%) or Morgan Stanley (8.76%). Following this announcement, Twitter shares have increased their value by 26%.
With a good 80 million subscribers, Musk is one of the best-known Twitter users. Musk keeps attracting attention with his sometimes erratic tweets.
The news comes quite unexpected, especially after Musk had publicly criticized Twitter’s approach to the delicate issue of free speech, publishing a poll on the same social network last March 25, with which he asked his followers to express themselves on the subject.
Elon Musk has also been strongly criticizing Twitter’s current CEO, Parag Agrawal, for a few months now. In December, he posted a meme comparing him to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Jack Dorsey (founder and ex-CEO) as Nikolai Yezhov, the Soviet chief of police being thrown into the river.
Musk is by far the richest person in the world. The financial service Bloomberg estimates his fortune at $273 billion — mainly thanks to the shares in the electric car manufacturer Tesla and the space company SpaceX. The stock market value of Twitter was a good 31 billion dollars.
