Just one day after billionaire Elon Musk became the largest shareholder of Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR), news today (Tuesday) emerged that the South African-born entrepreneur is to join the Twitter board.
According to filings made at the SEC, Elon Musk spent $3 billion USD to purchase a 9.2% stake equating to 73.5 million shares in the social media platform launched in July 2006. Musk now owns the most shares in Twitter, making him the company’s largest stakeholder. His stake is also more than four times that of founder Jack Dorsey, who owns 2.25 percent of the San Francisco-based company’s outstanding stock.
The top four Twitter shareholders are now:
- Elon Musk: 9.2%
- Vanguard: 8.8%
- Morgan Stanley: 8.4%
- Blackrock: 6.5%
Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) shares rose 3% on Tuesday’s trading, hitting $51.48 in early North American trading with Parag Agrawal the CEO of Twitter since November 2021 when founder Jack Dorsey stepped down from the role announced that Elon Musk would be joining the board.
The move comes just days Elon questioned the freedom of speech on the platform and now, all eyes will be on what Elon does next.
At the end of last year, Musk famously asked if he should sell 10% of his stock in his electric car firm Tesla, to which Twitter users said ‘yes’. It led to Musk selling around $5bn (£3.7bn) of shares in the firm in November.
Already, waves are being made and there promises to be an interesting time ahead for Twitter users as evidenced already.
