What do you do if you’re one of the richest men on Earth and can buy anything you want? Apparently, for Elon Musk, this means spending a fraction of your net worth to buy one of the largest social media platforms in the world.
After a $3 billion spending spree, the founder of Tesla now owns 9.2% of all Twitter shares, making him the single largest shareholder of one of his most frequented properties on the internet. Musk spent around $2.89 billion in a move that, once revealed, caused Twitter’s value on the stock market to go up 27%.
Naturally, netizens couldn’t help but wonder if Musk had ulterior motives for the random purchase. After all, Musk isn’t the biggest fan of the people running the show on Twitter. Specifically, he posted a meme showing current Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, as the Soviet political leader, Joseph Stalin, after the former replaced Jack Dorsey, who served as Twitter’s CEO from 2015 until 2021.
Musk is also a staunch critic of the site’s recent moves like enabling NFT profile pictures. On the other hand, Musk is most active on Twitter and he is one of the platform’s most-followed users, thanks, in part to the role he played in making the value of Dogecoin skyrocketing last year.
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
If owning a majority stake of Twitter is Musk’s way of gaining control and enacting reforms that are more in line with his views on free speech and democracy, then we’re all for it.
So far, save for asking Twitter users if they want an edit button or not, Musk nor Twitter has announced any changes coming to the site. However, this is all a matter of if and not when. Don’t be surprised if we see Twitter making more changes that align with Musk’s thinking.
