Elon Musk becomes Twitter's largest shareholder
This Monday , Twitter shares rose by 26% because billionaire Elon Musk bought 9.2% of them and became the company's main shareholder.
Elon Reeve Musk is a native of South Africa, but nationalized Canadian and American; He is a programmer, physicist and entrepreneur, who is also the co-founder of several companies such as PayPal, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Hyperloop, SolarCity, Neuralink and OpenAI. Currently, he is CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, as well as President of SolarCity.
Time Magazine named him in 2021 "Person of the Year" and among his many compliments he expressed that:
“With a flick of your finger, the stock market soars or swoons. An army of devotees is hanging on his every word. He is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new uninhabited one. He is like a clown and a genius, like a businessman and a showman, like a provocateur”.
Additionally, the daily updated Bloomberg Millionaires Index places him at the top of a ranking of 500 billionaires. Musk dethroned Amazon creator Jeff Bezos, who is now in second place with $193 billion while the Tesla mogul has a net worth of $288 million.
Musk, who has 80 million followers on Twitter, last month expressed through his account the intention to create a new platform, since, in his opinion, the social network does not allow freedom of expression.
“Since Twitter serves as a de facto public square, failing to adhere to the principles of free expression fundamentally undermines democracy. What needs to be done?” Elon tweeted and later spoke about the need for a new platform.
With the purchase of 9.2% of Twitter shares, the tycoon becomes the main shareholder of the company, surpassing even Jack Dorsey who owns only 2.25%, who also created it in 2006 and stepped down as CEO in November 2021.
It should be noted that according to a report from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the purchase of the shares by Elon Musk translates into approximately 3,000 million dollars and, in addition, this Monday before the opening of the session, Twitter had a stock market rise of 26%.
This rise in the company's shares came as soon as it became known that the richest man in the world, according to Bloomberg, invested in Twitter.
On the other hand, it should be noted that when the shares of a company are purchased and these are equal to or greater than 5%, said purchase must be disclosed in the documents filed with the Securities Exchange Commission. This movement can be understood as the fact that the South African billionaire wants to generate changes in the company's rules.
For this reason, Dan Ives, a technology analyst at Wedbush Securities, assured that:
“This is a shot at Twitter's board of directors and management team to start discussions. I think he intends to act and force change on Twitter."
However, since no specification of Elon Musk's new position in the company was given in the transaction, we will have to wait for the decisions made by the new majority shareholder of Twitter.