New Delhi/ New York | Jagran News Desk: Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, will join the board of directors of micro-blogging website Twitter, announced the company on Tuesday, a day after he revealed the details about his massive stake in the social media platform.
“I’m excited to share that we’re appointing Elon Musk to our board! Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board,” Twitter Chief Executive Officer (CEO)Parag Agrawal said in a tweet.
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“He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon,” he said in another Tweet.
On Monday, the 50-year-old Musk had revealed that he has a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter Inc, worth nearly USD 3 billion, making him one of the largest shareholders in the micro-blogging site.
A prolific Twitter user, Musk has over 80 million followers since joining the site in 2009 and has used the platform to make several announcements, including teasing a go-private deal for Tesla that landed him in hot water with regulators.
Of late, however, the world’s richest person has been critical of the social media platform and its policies, and recently ran a Twitter poll asking users if they believed the platform adheres to the principle of free speech, to which over 70 per cent voted “no.”
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In December, Musk put out a meme that compared CEO Agrawal with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and showed Jack Dorsey as a close associate who was later on executed.
Twitter’s latest quarterly results and lower-than-expected user additions have raised doubts about its growth prospects, even as it pursues big projects such as audio chat rooms and newsletters to end long-running stagnation.
“It does send a message to Twitter… having a meaningful stake in the company will keep them on their toes, because that passive stake could very quickly become an active stake,” said Thomas Hayes, managing member at Great Hill Capital LLC.
Musk – who, according to Forbes, has a net worth of about $300 billion – has been reducing his stake in Tesla since November, when he said he would offload 10% of his holding in the electric-car maker. He has already sold $16.4 billion worth of shares since then.
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A regulatory filing on Monday showed that Musk owns 73.5 million Twitter shares, which are held by the Elon Musk Revocable Trust, of which he is the sole trustee. Vanguard is Twitter’s second-biggest shareholder, with an 8.79% stake, according to Refinitiv data.
Twitter shares rose 27.1 per cent on Monday to close at USD 49.97. The stock, which had fallen 38 per cent in the past 12 months through Friday’s close, on Monday added as much as USD 8.38 billion to its market capitalization, which now stands at USD 39.3 billion.
