“Oh hello lol”, tweeted Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, who is no longer only an emblematic and whimsical user of Twitter, but also a major shareholder of the social network where he has more than 80 million subscribers and raises many controversies.
• Read also: A big equity investment by Elon Musk propels Twitter to the stock market
• Read also: Elon Musk challenges Vladimir Putin to a duel, with Ukraine as the stake
• Read also: Elon Musk wants to be able to tweet freely about Tesla
The richest man in the world now owns just over 9% of the capital of Twitter, after buying some 73.5 million shares of the Californian company.
1. “That’s me,” Elon Musk tweeted on June 4, 2010, to cut short a flood of messages from an impostor: “Please ignore the previous tweets as this was about someone being made pass for me :)”
until 2017, he remained relatively low-key, posting less than 1,000 tweets a year, according to data compiled by visualcapitalist.com. The rate of posts then escalated to around 3,000 tweets per year since 2019.
The multi-faceted entrepreneur speaks above all about Tesla (electric cars) and SpaceX (spaceflight), then about his start-ups, such as Neuralink (brain implants) and The Boring Company (tunnels), but also about his centers of interests.
2. On July 15, 2018, he calls British caver Vernon Unsworth a “pedo guy” in a tweet, which will later be deleted.
Vernon Unsworth accused the billionaire of having made a “publicity stunt” by sending a submarine of his design to rescue children trapped in a cave in Thailand.
This will earn Elon Musk a defamation lawsuit in a Los Angeles court. He will be acquitted in December 2019.
3. On August 7, 2018, he announced that he had the appropriate funding to remove Tesla from Wall Street at $420 a share.
As a result, the US stock market regulator, the SEC, ordered him to hand over the chairmanship of Tesla’s board of directors, pay a $20 million fine and subsequently demanded that his tweets directly related to the activity of Tesla are pre-approved by a competent lawyer.
Elon Musk challenged this latest measure in court in early March.
“At least 50% of my tweets are written on the throne (…)”, declared in November the leader who loves dubious jokes.
4. In October, he tweets that he would like to open a university called “Texas Institute of Technology & Science”, to the hilarity of his many admirers, because the acronym, “TITS”, stands for “tits”.
A few weeks later, a Tesla employee filed a complaint evoking a “culture of sexual harassment” within the Californian factory.
5. On November 6, 2021, Elon Musk launches a poll to find out whether or not he should sell 10% of his Tesla shares. About 58% of the 3.5 million voters respond in favor.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the SEC has opened an investigation to determine whether the boss and his brother Kimbal committed insider trading around the sale of shares.
The price of the title had fallen in the wake of the survey.
6. In May 2021, he announces that Tesla will accept payments in bitcoin, the most famous cryptoasset, but then backtracks, citing the environmental impact of mining (a technique for creating cryptocurrency).
He also uses Twitter to praise Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency originally a parody, helping to boost the price.
7. “I challenge Vladimir Putin in a man to man fight. The stake is Ukraine”, launched Elon Musk on March 14, three weeks after the start of the Russian offensive.
“Do you accept this fight?”, He added in another message, in Russian, addressed to the Kremlin.
8. Elon Musk recently posted the results of a poll on Twitter, where he asked his followers if they thought the company “rigorously” respects freedom of expression.
More than 70% of the 2 million voters answered “no”.
“Is a new platform necessary?” Also wondered the businessman.
Reference-www.tvanouvelles.ca