Billionaire Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, has recently acquired a three billion dollar Twitter stake, which equates to about 9.2% of the social media company, or 73,486,938 Twitter shares.
The news comes from a US securities filing, and according to the BBC, the acquisition, which reportedly happened on March 14, has now resulted in Twitter’s shares jumping up 25% in pre-market trading. With his acquisition, Musk now owns a larger Twitter share than the site’s original co-founder and until recently CEO Jack Dorsey, who currently owns 2.25%.
Being a regular and prolific Twitter user, Elon Musk’s official profile currently has over 80 million followers. He’s used the platform to not only share his views on current events and update people on what his companies are up to, but to interact with fans, often Tesla users, and has been known to regularly share witty memes.
This has created an image of being a different and fun, relatable “kind of billionaire,” as opposed to the likes of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Notably, the billionaire has used Twitter to share his views on the subject of free speech, and has been critical of social media sites, Twitter included, in regards to it.
The 50-year-old billionaire’s first breakthrough was through co-founding x.com, which was later renamed to PayPal and sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. Currently Musk is most well-known as the CEO of electric car company Tesla and aerospace manufacturer SpaceX.