Elon Musk Is Now Twitter’s Largest Shareholder; And That’s Probably Not A Good Thing

Elon Musk appears to have a childlike understanding of free speech, especially with regards to how content moderation and free speech work together. But after running a silly poll a few weeks ago, many people assumed that the reason Musk was agitating to see if people felt that Twitter “supported” free speech, was that he might try to buy the company. It turns out, he was already in the process of trying to do so. On Monday it was announced that Musk has accumulated nearly 10% of Twitter’s shares, via some pocket change, making him the single largest shareholder in the company.

The purchase, equal to 9.2 percent of the company, appears to make Mr. Musk Twitter’s largest shareholder. His holding is slightly larger than Vanguard’s 8.8 percent at the end of last year, and it dwarfs the 2.3 percent stake of Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former chief executive. The shares represent a fraction of Mr. Musk’s reported $270 billion-plus net worth.

It’s unclear, in the short term, what that will mean for the company. It’s not clear, for example, that Musk will get a board seat or become a particularly active board member, but given his agitating, and the way he’s handled some of his other companies, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if he does end up becoming quite active.

It is unclear what Mr. Musk’s plans are beyond the large shareholder position and whether he’ll ask — or be invited — to join Twitter’s board. Mr. Musk filed a securities document indicating that he planned for the investment to be passive, meaning he does not intend to pursue control of the company. But there was also speculation Monday that he could change the status of his investment, continue buying shares or even try to acquire the company outright, today’s DealBook newsletter reported.

“We would expect this passive stake as just the start of broader conversations with the Twitter board/management that could ultimately lead to an active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter,” Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said Monday morning.

Again, I think Musk deserves praise for driving some innovations forward, and having a unique vision on how to execute on big, challenging scientific problems — like sending rockets into space and building electric cars, among other things. But managing speech is not a scientific or engineering problem. It’s a human challenge. And Musk does not exactly have the greatest of track records in showing empathy, or, frankly, common decency.

When the initial rumors were that Musk might start a competing social network, I was at least intrigued to see how that might compete with something like Twitter. But I do wonder how much his naïve take on speech might do serious harm to Twitter.

Honestly, I hope this drives the Bluesky team to focus that much more on its efforts, because if Musk is intent on ruining Twitter, which may actually come to pass, having an easy offramp to building a better Twitter would be important.