Elon Musk buys $3bn worth of shares in Twitter, and becomes the company’s largest shareholder, displacing the founder, Jack Dorcey
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk has bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter, according to a US securities filing, which makes him the company’s largest shareholder.
The Tesla founder and tech guru bought 73 million Twitter shares on March 14, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which is worth $2.89bn (£2.20bn), and is more than four times the 2.25% holding of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
The news sent Twitter shares soaring about 25% in pre-market trading on Monday, April 4.
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Musk, a regular Twitter user with more than 80 million followers, recently said he is giving “serious thought” to building a new social media platform, after asking his followers whether they thought the social media platform encouraged free speech.
“Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”
He then asked: “Is a new platform needed?”
The 51-year-old Elon Musk is an entrepreneur, investor, and business magnate. He is the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer at SpaceX; CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. With an estimated net worth of around US$270 billion as of March 2022, Musk is the wealthiest person in the world according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the Forbes real-time billionaires list.
Musk was born to a Canadian mother and South African father, and raised in Pretoria, South Africa. He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada at age 17 to avoid conscription. He was enrolled at Queen’s University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later, where he received a bachelor’s degree in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but decided instead to pursue a business career, co-founding the web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. The same year, Musk co-founded online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. The company was bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.