The Tesla CEO has become the largest shareholder of microblogging website Twitter and has promised big changes.
Elon Musk has come to prominence by disrupting industries. Consider:
— As co-founder of the payment-services fintech PayPal Holdings (PYPL) – Get PayPal Holdings, Inc. Report, he helped transform the financial and banking industry.
— With SpaceX, he promised, with others, to relaunch the conquest of space with the promise of making Mars habitable for humans.
— By founding Boring Co. Musk made it his mission to solve the problem of traffic jams in major cities.
— His Neuralink company develops humanoid robots to which we will be able to transfer our brains and download our personalities.
— And his center of gravity is Tesla (TSLA) – Get Tesla Inc Report, the company with which the billionaire promises to save the planet from pollution by making environmentally friendly cars and solar panels.
He has managed to make Tesla, co-founded in 2003, one of the most valuable companies on the planet with a market cap of more than $1.08 trillion. The T brand has become the benchmark in the electric-vehicle sector.
Musk has also become the richest man in the world, with a personal net worth estimated at $265 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
A Seat at the Twitter Table
And he doesn’t seem to want to stop there. He is now on a mission to change Twitter (TWTR) – Get Twitter, Inc. Report. The social network has become his favorite communication channel, but the mogul is not very happy with Twitter’s principles regarding free speech.
He also strongly criticized the first strategic measures of the platform’s new chief executive, Parag Agrawal. Musk isn’t particularly a fan of integrating nonfungible tokens into Twitter and he says the group has other priorities if it wants to grow its user base, audience and revenue.
To be heard more loudly and clearly, he decided to take a seat at the table. The billionaire began acquiring Twitter shares in January and on April 4 disclosed that he held a more than 9% stake in the San Francisco social-media company.
Twitter and Musk immediately announced an agreement under which Musk until 2024 could acquire no more than 14.9% of Twitter. In exchange he received a seat on the board. Musk seems satisfied with this agreement, which gives him enough leverage to force the group to change.
A board reviews and validates a company’s strategic plan and execution. It has the power to recalibrate a strategic plan and to dismiss the CEO.
“Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!” Musk posted on Twitter on April 5.
This tweet sparked speculation about upcoming changes to Twitter. Musk has already launched a poll on the platform, asking users if they wanted an edit button, which would allow them to modify their tweets.
The company then reacted by saying that it had been working on this option for several months. The group also let it be known that the option would be tested soon. (The Wall Street Journal has a warning about the edit function here.)
Smoking Board Meeting?
The billionaire clearly enjoys his growing influence. He has just given us the preview of what may be the first Twitter board meeting in which he will participate.
He shared a meme of him showing him smoking marijuana during his participation in Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2018. This scene had earned him some trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission and with the Pentagon because he has a national security clearance. Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, is a U.S. Defense Department contractor.
Musk did not add a word to the meme, leaving that task to his fans on social media.
“I like the way you think @elonmusk 😜,” one user commented.
“Elon Musk advise the Twitter board not to introduce the “edit button” cos people will abuse this feature if introduced,” another user wrote. “What Twitter needs to do is stop censoring free speech & also increase the text character so users can type more words without creating unnecessary threads.”
Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall in the Twitter boardroom during that meeting?
