Elon Musk Becomes Twitters Largest Stakeholder

Elon Musk is not only the world’s richest man, but now he’s the world’s largest stakeholder of social media platform Twitter.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO now owns 73,486,938 shares of Twitter according to the SEC. The amount is valued at a whopping $2.89 billion based on last Fridays’ closing price of $39.31 a share.

The stock had climbed over $10 a share on Monday.

Musk already got to action with his new role of largest stakeholder by teasing the world with the idea of an edit button. Twitter is known for not allowing its users to update their tweets.
He tweeted out a yes-or-no poll for the edit button to his 80 million followers, cheekily misspelling the choices as “yse” and “on” – a reference to users’ inability to correct typos once tweets are sent.

As of Monday evening, “yse” was winning with more than 75% of the vote.

He had asked his followers last month whether they believed Twitter adhered to the principle of free speech, which he said “is essential to a functioning democracy.”

They overwhelmingly voted “no,” and he floated the idea of founding a new social media platform.

He surprised the market by scooping up more than 9% of Twitter itself this week.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in 2020 that the company would “probably never” implement an edit feature.

On Friday, which was also April Fool’s Day, the company tweeted, “we are working on an edit button.”

In 2018, Musk was charged $20 million in fines by the Securities and Exchange Commission for “misleading investors with tweets,” CNBC reported. The run-in with the SEC also resulted in Musk needing to have some of his tweets screened by Tesla’s lawyers.

“This makes sense given what Musk has at least been talking about, at least from a social media perspective,” Wedbush’s Dan Ives said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.