Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc, has established a 9.2 per cent position in Twitter Inc, according to a regulatory filing on Monday, possibly making him the largest investor in the microblogging site.
Twitter shares jumped 26% in premarket trading on the filing, which comes just days after Musk tweeted that he was giving “serious thought” to developing a new social media platform.
Other social media companies, including Meta Platforms FB.O and Snapchat owner Snap Inc, were also trading higher.
Musk owns 73.5 million Twitter shares, which are worth up to $2.9 billion depending on the stock’s Friday closing. The Elon Musk Revocable Trust owns the shares.
Musk, a frequent Twitter user, has over 80 million followers since joining in 2009 and has used the network to make various announcements, including dangling a Tesla go-private transaction, which put him under regulatory scrutiny.
He, on the other hand, has recently been critical of the social media platform and its regulations, claiming that the firm undermines democracy by failing to adhere to free speech values.
Meanwhile, Musk and Twitter’s billionaire co-founder, Jack Dorsey, have agreed to discard the so-called Web3, a vague phrase for a decentralised utopian version of the internet.
Musk is also the founder and CEO of SpaceX, as well as the creator and CEO of the brain-chip startup Neuralink and the infrastructure firm The Boring Company.