The Tesla boss is now also a major shareholder of Twitter.
(Photo: AP)
New York, Dusseldorf Elon Musk and Twitter have a long history: the Tesla boss has been active on the platform since June 2009, posting and replying to his more than 80 million followers day and night. This makes the billionaire one of the ten most popular personalities of the short message service.
The 50-year-old has now bought a total of 73.5 million Twitter shares worth $2.89 billion, according to a mandatory announcement to the stock market on Monday. With 9.2 percent, Musk is one of the largest shareholders in the group. In response to the news, the price of the paper shot up more than 22 percent at the start of trading on Monday.
In purely arithmetic terms, Musk made a profit of around $550 million in one fell swoop. But that’s hardly what the world’s richest person, with an estimated fortune of $273 billion, will care about. The participation also makes little strategic sense: both the business of his electric car manufacturer Tesla and his space company SpaceX have little to do with Twitter.
Musk is about principle. The Tesla boss senses censorship on Twitter. Just over a week ago he conducted a survey among his followers: “Free speech is essential for a functioning democracy. Do you think Twitter strictly adheres to this principle?” Around 70 percent voted “No”.
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Musk followed up a day later. The service is the “de facto public marketplace”, but does not comply with the “principles of free speech”. It “undermines democracy”. When asked by a follower if he was considering starting his own news service, Musk replied, “I’m seriously considering it.”
At the time, however, the Tesla boss had already bought shares from Twitter, as the mandatory announcement shows. As one of the largest shareholders, he can now address his complaints directly to the Management Board and the Supervisory Board. A reform proposal: Twitter should switch to open source software in order to create more transparency.
His eager tweets also got the Tesla boss in trouble with the SEC. In the summer of 2018 he wrote on Twitter that he wanted to take the electric car manufacturer off the stock market and that the financing for this was secured – although there had only been preliminary talks. In the end, Musk had to pay a fine, step down from Tesla’s board of directors, and commit to declassifying tweets that could potentially impact the stock price. He still argues with the SEC about this.
Musk compared Twitter CEO to Stalin
Musk may build electric cars and sell solar roofs – but the entrepreneur is anything but a left-liberal thinker. Last December, he posted a manipulated photo showing new Twitter boss Parag Agrawal as Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and Agrawal’s predecessor Jack Dorsey as Nikolai Yezhov. The notorious head of the secret police fell victim to Stalin’s purges.
Musk is friends with Twitter founder Dorsey, and the two talk a lot about Bitcoin and technology issues. When the hedge fund urged Elliott Dorsey to resign in March 2020, Musk didn’t like it much. “I endorse Jack as Twitter CEO,” Musk said. “He has a good heart.”
His successor Agrawal, who has been in office since November, has drawn criticism, especially from right-wing circles, for his course against misinformation. Born in India, he has worked at Twitter since 2011, most recently as Chief Technology Officer. The 37-year-old wants to speed up decision-making and bring numerous new products to the platform. Revenue is expected to increase from the current five to $7.5 billion by the end of 2023, and 315 million users will be logging in daily, up from 217 million at the moment.
The machine learning expert became head of Twitter at the age of 37 – and has drawn criticism from Musk.
(Photo: imago images/ZUMA Wire)
The aggressive growth targets will change the network. Basically, Twitter still works as it did when it was launched in 2006: users inform themselves and discuss with each other on the basis of short text messages, supplemented by links, images and videos. The most revolutionary step was raising the limit from 140 to 280 characters per tweet in 2017. The number of users has only been increasing slowly for years.
As CTO, Agrawal therefore began to add further functions to the service. A feature called “Super Follows” was introduced, which allows some users to charge their fans for additional material. In 2021, the “Twitter Spaces” area was launched, an audio service where users can start or listen to live conversations – similar to the Clubhouse app, which was hyped during the corona pandemic.
In the course of the corona pandemic, Twitter experienced an increasing politicization of discussions on the platform. The company has repeatedly been accused of doing too little against misinformation and conspiracy theories in connection with the pandemic and the Covid vaccination. Twitter reacted – and announced in March 2020 that it would mark corresponding tweets. Some of these were subsequently provided with links to reliable Covid information.
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