Musk Moves on Twitter Shares
Billionaire Elon Musk has recently made a big purchase of Twitter stock, buying enough to take a 9.2% stake - making him the largest current shareholder.
According to a regulatory filing dated on the 14th of March, Elon R Musk purchased over 73 million shares of common stock in Twitter. At the average price for the day of $33.03 USD, that would have cost him about 2.4 billion dollars plus fees and such.
The purchase comes just ten days before Musk polled his 80 million plus followers about Twitter’s adherence to free speech philosophy, and used the opportunity to suggest he was thinking about starting his own platform.
70% of the 2 million respondents certainly think Twitter isn’t keeping a free speech environment, and with Elon following up with, “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.”, there’s speculation as to if the tech CEO plans on continuing to gather Twitter stock - or make his own app.
This certainly wouldn’t be the first time Musk has taken it upon himself to solve a problem he’s identified; and he’s said before that he’d like to make his own app; but does he even need to start one? Especially given the track record of “anti-twitter” social apps, Elon is lucky he’s got another route: gaining an active stake in Twitter.
In order to change his “passive stake” to an “active stake” and begin influencing Twitter policy, he’d only need another 0.8% and he could vote for who becomes CEO and could even get himself named Chair of the Board of Governance if he wanted.
That seems like a much easier track to take than making a whole new app, but given Elon’s history, the easy route isn’t often the one he takes. As usual, we’ll just have to wait and see.