Elon Musk, now Twitter’s biggest shareholder, has been appointed to Twitter’s board of directors, according to company CEO Parag Agrawal, who announced the news today.
Musk who has more than 80 million followers on Twitter from the time he joined the site in 2009, joins Agrawal, business founder Jack Dorsey, Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, and British peer Martha Lane Fox on the board. Musk now owns 73.5 million Twitter shares, according to a regulatory filing on Monday.
“He’s both a fervent supporter and a harsh critic of the service, which is precisely what we need on Twitter and in the boardroom to make us stronger in the long run,” Agrawal said.
According to paperwork made public on Monday, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, purchased a 9.2 percent interest in Twitter for roughly $3 billion (€2.7 billion). After the transaction was made public, he became Twitter’s largest shareholder, and shares soared by more than 27%.
Hours after his Twitter stake was made public on Monday, Musk ran a poll asking users if they wanted an edit button on the microblogging network. “Would you like an edit button?” Musk inquired later in the day in a tweet. By Tuesday morning, more than 2.2 million users had voted, with over 75% favouring an edit option. In response to Musk’s survey, Twitter CEO Agrawal said that the results of the poll will be significant. “Please vote with care,” he said. On April 1, Twitter’s official account posted that it was working on the long-awaited “edit” function.
When asked if the tweet was a prank, the corporation responded, “We cannot confirm or deny, but we may modify our remark later.”
Musk’s decision was detailed in a regulatory filing, following his statement that he was “seriously considering” creating a new social media platform while challenging Twitter’s dedication to free expression. Musk asked if Twitter’s algorithm should be open source in another poll last week. More than 82% users agreed, and former CEO Jack Dorsey stated that “the choice of which algorithm to employ (or not) should be available to everyone.”
Musk has used the platform to make various announcements. The world’s wealthiest person has recently been critical of social media site and its practices and held a Twitter poll asking people if they believed the network adhered to the ideal of free expression, to which more than 70% answered “no.” Musk, who has a net worth of over $300 billion (€273 billion), has been reducing his position in Tesla since November when he declared he would sell 10% of his interest in the electric-car producer. After that, he has sold $16.4 billion (€15 billion) in shares.
