Elon Musk buys $3bn Twitter stake causing spike in shares

The purchase makes Musk Twitter's largest shareholder

Elon Musk has sent Twitter shares soaring by 25 percent after he purchased a $2.89bn (£2.20bn) stake in the social media site. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the billionaire bought 73,486,938 Twitter shares on 14 March. The Tesla founder is yet to publicly comment on the purchase. The Telegraph reports that on Friday afternoon, Twitter's share price closed at $39.30. But this had soared to $50.60 in pre-market open trading on Monday. The purchase of the shares makes Musk Twitter's largest shareholder, ahead of the platform's founder Jack Dorsey who has a 2 percent stake in the business. The move comes just days after he had openly questioned whether Twitter encouraged free speech or not, asking his 80 million followers whether a "new platform" is needed. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507777913042571267 Two days before this, he tweeted about being “worried about de facto bias in ‘the Twitter algorithm’ having a major effect on public discourse.” And on March 25 he tweeted that “free speech is essential to a functioning democracy”, and polled his followers on whether they thought “Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle”. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507272763597373461 He bought the shares in the platform before these tweets. Musk is no stranger to some controversy on Twitter. Last October he got into a dispute with the UN World Food Programme (WFP) after its head said that just 2 percent of Musk's wealth could help solve world hunger. In response to this, Musk tweeted that he would sell $6bn in Tesla stock and donate it to the WFP if it could prove "exactly how $6bn will solve world hunger". https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1454808104256737289 Related links:

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