Musk Takes 9% Stake In Twitter

Tesla Inc boss Elon Musk on Monday disclosed a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc, worth nearly $3 billion, making him the micro-blogging site's largest shareholder and triggering a rise of more than 27% in the company's shares, reports Reuters.

Musk's move, revealed in a regulatory filing, comes on the heels of his tweet that he was giving "serious thought" to building a new social media platform, while questioning Twitter's commitment to free speech.

Elon Musk

He also started a poll asking Twitter users if they want an edit button, a long-awaited feature on which the social media platform has been working. It was followed by Chief Executive Parag Agrawal urging users to "vote carefully".

In less than three hours of starting the poll, more than 1.2 million users voted, with over 75% of them backing an edit option.

Last week, in another poll, Musk had asked if Twitter alogrithm should be open source. More than 82% of the users said yes, while former CEO Jack Dorsey said, "the choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone."

A prolific Twitter user, Musk has over 80 million followers since joining the site in 2009 and has used the platform to make several announcements, including teasing a go-private deal for Tesla that landed him in hot water with regulators.

Of late, however, the world's richest person has been critical of the social media platform and its policies, and recently ran a Twitter poll asking users if they believed the platform adheres to the principle of free speech, to which over 70% voted "no." read more

Twitter's latest quarterly results and lower-than-expected user additions have raised doubts about its growth prospects, even as it pursues big projects such as audio chat rooms and newsletters to end long-running stagnation.