The billionaire Elon Musk has taken an almost $3bn (£2.3bn) stake in Twitter to become the social media platform’s largest shareholder.
The world’s richest man, who has a penchant for eccentric behaviour frequently involving posts on Twitter, has built a 9.2% stake in Twitter, according to filings made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday.
The boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who with more than 80 million followers ranks in the top 10 most popular Twitter users globally, paid $2.89bn for the stake at Twitter’s closing share price on Friday.
Shares in the microblogging site soared as much as 26% in pre-market trading on the back of the news, adding more than $8bn to its $31.5bn market value before Musk’s interest was made public. After the stock price jump Musk’s shares are now worth about $3.6bn.
Musk, who just last week said he was “giving serious thought” to building his own social media platform, now holds a stake more than four times the 2.25% holding of the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
The 50-year-old – who has a personal fortune estimated at $289bn, almost $100bn more than the world’s next richest person, the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos – has often found himself in trouble for tweeting contentious remarks.
Musk’s many questionable Twitter moments include calling Vernon Unsworth, a diver who helped rescue a team of young football players stuck in a flooded cave in Thailand, “pedo guy” after he criticised his plan to save them with a submarine.
Musk eventually deleted the tweets and apologised to Unsworth, who sued for $190m in damages for the tweets. The jury found the Tesla boss did not defame Unsworth, and after the verdict Musk told reporters in the hallway of the courtroom: “My faith in humanity is restored.”
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Analysts believe the shareholding taken by Musk, who has been highly critical of Twitter, is likely to result in him taking an active interest in the microblogging site that could lead to a buyout.
“We would expect this passive stake as just the start of broader conversations with the Twitter board/management that could ultimately lead to an active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter,” said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.
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