Oliver Haslam on April 4, 2022, 9:32 pm

Tesla CEO Elon Musk Becomes Twitter’s Largest Stakeholder

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is now the largest Twitter stakeholder after he bought a 9.2% chunk of the company. Musk reportedly bought 7.3 million shares worth around $2.9 billion.

The news comes after a regulatory filing with the SEC outed the numbers, according to an NPR report. It also comes just days after Musk tweeted to say that he might consider building his own social network amid concerns that Twitter was preventing free speech.

Now, while Musk’s shares don’t necessarily allow him to make changes at Twitter, one analyst believes it’s only a matter of time before that changes.

“We would expect this passive stake as just the start of broader conversations with the Twitter board/management that could ultimately lead to an active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter,” Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said in a client note early Monday.

Twitter saw its stocks jump by 20% when the news broke.

Musk has long been an active member of the Twitter community, something that has previously gotten him into trouble with US authorities. Musk now has to have his tweets vetted before they can be published following concerns that he was using them to manipulate stock prices.

Tesla and Musk have already agreed to pay $40 million in civil fines following an incident in 2018 where he claimed he had the money to take the company private despite the fact that he did not.