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Tesla boss Musk becomes the largest Twitter shareholder
Tesla boss Elon Musk has 80 million followers on Twitter. Photo: Patrick Pleul/dpa-Zentralbild/POOL/dpa
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What does Elon Musk want with a large stake in Twitter? The Tesla boss is keeping a low profile. It is striking that a few days ago he launched a poll on freedom of speech.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become Twitter’s largest shareholder. The tech billionaire holds a 9.2 percent stake, the short message service said.
Twitter shares then rose more than a quarter in early U.S. trade. With a good 80 million subscribers, Musk is one of the best-known Twitter users.
Just about a week ago, Musk asked Twitter users for opinions on whether the service strictly adheres to the principle of free speech. “The consequences of this poll will be significant,” he wrote. In the non-representative survey, 70 percent found that Twitter did not implement freedom of speech consistently enough.
Conservatives and supporters of ex-President Donald Trump in particular have criticized Twitter for taking action against incorrect and dubious information about the corona virus. Trump is banned from Twitter after his words of support for his supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. So far, the service has also emphasized – unlike Facebook and YouTube – that there is no way back for the ex-president.
In the early days of the pandemic, Musk himself downplayed the dangers of the virus and criticized Covid restrictions in California as “fascist”. For him, Twitter is an important communication channel – and one with which he has got himself into trouble.
In a dispute with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk was threatened with losing the top job at Tesla after he wrote on Twitter in the summer of 2018 that he wanted to take the electric car manufacturer off the stock market and that the financing for this was secured – although there were only preliminary talks had given.
In the end, Musk had to pay a fine, step down from Tesla’s board of directors, and agree to have tweets with potential impact on the company’s share price cleared. He still argues with the SEC about this and accuses the agency of restricting his freedom of speech.
The 50-year-old uses Twitter not only for announcements about Tesla and his space company SpaceX, but also for forwarding joke tweets, for provocative expressions of opinion, in support of cryptocurrencies – or for exchanging blows with critics. In February, he caused outrage by attacking Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. A later-deleted tweet captioned a photo of Adolf Hitler: “Stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau. I had a household.”
Musk was responding to a report on police crackdowns on cryptocurrency transactions surrounding truck driver protests. For years, the Canadian government had trouble drawing up a budget.
After Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey handed the post over to Parag Agrawal as head of the service, Musk tweeted an edited historical photo that placed Agrawal’s face on the figure of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Dorsey, in turn, was portrayed as Stalin’s intelligence chief, Nikolai Yezhov, who ended up falling victim to the Kremlin chief’s “purges.”
For Twitter, Musk is also one of the prominent users who keep the platform in the spotlight. In the fall, he caused a stir with the Twitter poll in which he had users oblige himself to part with ten percent of his Tesla stake. Musk had to sell part of his stake anyway to pay taxes on maturing stock options.
The entrepreneur is by far the richest person in the world. The financial service Bloomberg estimates his fortune at $ 273 billion – thanks mainly to the shares in Tesla and SpaceX. The stock market value of Twitter was a good 31 billion dollars.
In his first tweet after announcing the deal, Musk just wrote “Oh hi lol” instead of explaining the deal.