A new SEC filing revealed that Elon Musk, better known as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, invested almost $3 billion in Twitter and now owns almost 10% of the social media platform.
Musk, the richest man in the world, famously doesn’t have many investments.
While most billionaires have most of their assets linked to a single company, like Jeff Bezos with Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg with Meta (Facebook), they tend to also have a diversified portfolio of stocks worth at least a few billion dollars.
On the other hand, Musk always claimed that the only public stock he owns is Tesla’s, a company he leads and cofounded. He also has a few private investments, but always in companies that he is directly involved in, such as SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink.
In the past, he has been known to make some small investments in startups, like in DeepMind but investing has never been a big part of his business… until now.
Today, Twitter released a new SEC filing to disclose that an investor has now acquired a stake of over 5% of the company’s outstanding shares – something it is required to do as per SEC rules.
The investor is none other than Elon Musk.
Musk bought 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, which is worth around $2.9 billion as of Friday’s close or about 9.2% of the entire company.
That’s more shares than Jack Dorsey, Twitter cofounder and recently exited CEO, owns in the company. And even more shares than The Vanguard Group, which was previously the biggest holder – albeit an institutional one.
The filing sent Twitter’s stock price surging 25% in pre-market trading.
Musk’s investment in the social media platform comes just days after he made several comments suggesting that Twitter was moving away from free speech:
He even floated the idea that he might be involved in launching a new social platform, but now it appears that he instead plans to change things from the inside.
The CEO is extremely popular on Twitter with over 80 million followers and uses it as his main way of communication with the public.
With most of Musk’s fortune being tied to SpaceX and Tesla, the CEO was famously cash poor and even in debt with banks after borrowing against his Tesla’s stock.
However, last year, he sold roughly 10% of his stake in Tesla to pay taxes after receiving billions worth in stock options. After the transaction and giving some shares to charity, we believe Musk still had a few billion dollars left in cash from the transaction.
It’s likely that he used that money to invest in Twitter.
With almost a 10% stake in the company, Musk could be pushing for a board seat and become influential in the company.
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