Elon Musk Now Owns Nearly 10% of Twitter

Twitter is already a pretty bad place to begin with, but a quiet acquisition of shares over the weekend may indicate that the platform is about to get a whole lot worse: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and notorious unhinged shit-poster, is now the platform’s biggest shareholder and owns a whopping 9.2% of Twitter Inc.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Musk’s latest purchase was unveiled that day in a regulatory filing. The move even prompted Twitter shares to surge about 26% in premarket trading. The publication estimates that Musk’s new stake is “worth about $2.89 billion, based on Friday’s market close.”

This move is bold for a lot of reasons, but the most obvious one is that Musk has a very tumultuous relationship with the platform. In equal measure, the Tesla founder has been both a loud mouth about how much he hates Twitter and how much he loves it (and its founder, Jack Dorsey). Though, like many of the most insufferable people on the platform, Musk’s brand is that he’ll complain and then still tweet incessantly.

It’s unclear what Musk will try and do with his latest purchase, but some hints can be gleaned from his own Twitter page. Last month, the 50-year-old polled his millions of followers to ask who believes “Twitter rigorously adheres” to the principle that “free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.” When more than 70% of responders said Twitter wasn’t doing that, Musk asked if a new platform was “needed.”

Will Elon blow it all up and start anew? Maybe he’ll just destroy it and give us all some peace. I can certainly dream, can’t I?

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