The founder and executive president of the American electric car manufacturer Tesla, bought 9.2% of Twitter shares for 2.9 billion dollars, thus becoming the main shareholder of the micromessaging social network. In total he purchased 73.5 million shares.
Shares of Twitter closed trading Monday up 27.12% at $49.97 on Wall Street. That increase earned the company $8.535 million in market capitalization value in one day. Its current market value is $40 billion.
The transaction was supposed to be secret but Musk had to report it to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Said purchase was made since March 15 but it was not until this Monday when the transaction was made public.
Days after the purchase, on March 25, Musk criticized Twitter. In a controversial publication, as usual, he presented a survey to his followers (he has about 80 million) in which he stated that “freedom of expression is essential for a functional democracy”, asking if users believed that Twitter adhered to this principle. The final results show that 70.4% of users voted no.
After Musk’s purchase, Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey was left with just 2.3% of the shares. The transaction made Elon Musk the most powerful person yet to influence the moves of a company that changed CEOs late last year, when Parag Agrawal was given control from Dorsey.
According to Signum Research, this purchase made it the largest shareholder in the group, ahead of the investment fund Vanguard (8.4%), the Morgan Stanley bank (8.1%) and the asset manager BlackRock (4.6%), among others.
nonconformity
It is not yet known if Musk will take an active role within Twitter, as it was not specified in the transaction and could be just one more investor.
“Elon Musk is a regular Twitter user, as was Donald Trump until he was suspended. Musk, like Trump at the time, is against how Twitter blocks the freedom of expression of its users,” said Alberto Carrillo, a stock market specialist on technology issues.
“This could also be one of the reasons why Musk decided to buy shares of Twitter, because in the United States, with almost 10% shareholding, one has a guaranteed seat on the board of directors of companies and can change things. Now, it remains to be seen if he is going to do it, ”he explained in a telephone interview.
“He is the main investor in Twitter, which makes him one of the people with the greatest decision-making capacity within the social network,” said Carrillo.
For their part, Wedbush analysts explained in a note that “passive participation within Twitter could be expected to be the beginning of broader conversations with the social network’s board, which would lead to a more aggressive position.”
“Musk is the richest man in the world and he can afford to buy a part of a company like Twitter if he doesn’t agree with the way the business is run,” said Alberto Carrillo.
Already in October 2018, Elon Musk’s account was suspended on Twitter. On that occasion, the CEO of Tesla and Space X claimed that Twitter had temporarily blocked his official account, thinking that he had been hacked.
Musk is one of the biggest critics of Twitter, despite also being one of those who has benefited the most from the platform. It is well known that Tesla does not invest in traditional advertising, preferring that users themselves share their experiences on social networks.
Musk has also used Twitter to promote his products and to share ‘memes’, not without controversy. For example, the issue of ‘free speech’ on Twitter comes at a time when former US President Donald Trump has not achieved the success he hoped for on his alternative social network, Truth Social. Trump was banned from Twitter after the storming of the US Capitol for “inciting violence”.
dogecoin booster
Elon Musk is one of the main promoters of the dogecoin cryptocurrency. In fact, he has published several tweets on his Twitter account about its advantages.
I once posted that “a lot of people I’ve talked to on the production lines at Tesla or who are building rockets at SpaceX have doge. They’re not financial experts or Silicon Valley technologists. That’s why I decided to support doge, it felt like the cryptography of the people”.
Another reason why the owner of Tesla supports this cryptocurrency is because the adoption rate of this token in the United States rose by 30 percent. That is, many of the main investors in the American Union have dogecoins.
Alberto Carrillo said that support for dogecoin could be another reason why Elon Musk bought shares of Twitter. “Musk could make it possible to make digital financial operations with cryptocurrencies, such as dogecoin, on Twitter.”
Elon Musk is the richest man in the world with a fortune of 273,000 million dollars.
In 2002, with the sale of PayPal, the businessman earned 180 million dollars.
In addition to Tesla, he owns SpaceX (a space travel company); SolarCity (provides solar energy services); Hyperloop One (markets technology for cargo and/or passenger transport), among many others (With information from agencies and elEcomista.es)