Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Product Architect of Tesla has acquired 73,486,938 Twitter shares.
The acquired stake is reportedly worth about $2.89 billion. Musk has joined Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street Corporation to be among the top shareholders of the media platform.
In the early hours of Monday, Twitter published a note that confirmed that Elon had taken a 9.2% share of the company. The share purchase skyrocketed Twitter’s stock and is 23% above its Friday closing price.
It should not be a surprise that Elon Musk is known for holding Twitter polls to make some business decisions. Sometime in March, he made mention (on Twitter) that he was planning and having serious thoughts to create a social media platform.
He began by teasing a poll where he asked his followers about their thoughts on Twitter’s algorithm being open source. He also stressed the importance of their replies as he mentioned that ‘the results of this poll will be important, please vote carefully.’
The poll contained questions asking his followers if the company (Twitter) adheres to the principle of free speech. More than 70% said no.
This action has attracted lots of critics with takes on how starting a social network from scratch is a long play and also has no guarantee to succeed.
