Regulatory documents released on Monday (April 4) Eastern time showed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought a large number of shares in twitter and became the largest external shareholder of the social media giant. Boosted by the news, Twitter's share price soared by more than 26%. Other social media stocks also generally rose, with pinterest up more than 8%, snap and metaplatforms up more than 3%.
According to the 13g document issued by the securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), musk holds 73486938 shares of twitter, equivalent to 9.2% of the company. Based on Twitter's closing price on Friday, Musk's shares are worth about $2.89 billion.
Musk is a deep user of social media. He has more than 80 million followers on twitter. Not long ago, musk publicly criticized Twitter's policy, saying that the company failed to fulfill its commitment to freedom of speech, and said he was considering setting up a competitive social media company.
It is unclear what musk intended to buy twitter shares. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives warned that musk may take a more radical position in this regard and may even lead to some form of acquisition.
Although the company has been under pressure to accelerate the growth of new products in the industry for many years, it has not been significantly behind its peers in the development of new products.
Last November, twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced his resignation as CEO, and Parag Agrawal, then Twitter's chief technology officer, took his place. In the six months before Dorsey announced his resignation, Twitter's share price fell by more than 1 / 3, which put great pressure on Dorsey and finally led to his resignation.
After taking over as CEO of twitter, Agrawal set huge growth targets, including increasing annual revenue to $7.5 billion and increasing the number of daily users to 315 million by the end of 2023.
