The share price of Twitter fell by 7.5% following a U-turn from Elon Musk that he would not be joining the board of the social media brand. The Tesla boss had previously revealed that he was the largest shareholder in Twitter and plans were underway to get Musk on the board.
The billionaire disclosed his 9.2% stake in Twitter on April 4 and it was enough to cause the share price of the social media giant to skyrocket over 27%. This marked Twitter’s best day on the markets since the brand’s initial public offering in 2013.
The next day, both Musk and Twitter announced that he would be joining the Twitter board. While the appointment of Musk was expected to take place on Saturday, the entrepreneur instead decided to backtrack and announce that he would not be joining Twitter after all.
Such a move appears to have caught Twitter off-guard. The social media brand’s investor relations page failed to be updated over the weekend, and Musk’s name still featured as a board member. Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, was quick to smooth over the confusion noting that the brand would still be open to Musk’s input and that the social media company was, ‘excited to collaborate,’ with the billionaire.
There was no reason given as to why Musk backtracked out of joining the Twitter board. However, it is worth noting that he would only have been able to own 14.9% of the company’s shares as a board member. At the moment, Musk owns over four-times the amount of Twitter shares as that of the company’s founder, Jack Dorsey.
Rather than clearing up the confusion, the Tesla CEO spent much of the weekend coming up with some ideas about what he would do to improve the social media giant.
Most of these ideas were suggestions about improvements for the Twitter Blue subscription package. These would include letting Twitter Blue users make payments with the Dogecoin cryptocurrency and get an authentication checkmark. He also suggested that Twitter Blue should run without any advertising.
Obviously, given Musk’s care-free use of social media, there were also a number of ideas that highlighted the entrepreneur’s sense of humor. One of these was the suggestion that Twitter should drop the ‘w’ from its brand name to become ‘Titter’. Another idea was that Twitter’s offices could be turned into a homeless shelter, and then there were wry remarks that Twitter was dying and that its user numbers were inflated by bots.
Musk is one of Twitter’s most popular and vocal users with over 80 million followers hanging on his every word about everything from cryptocurrencies to the state of the US economy. While Musk’s suggestions that Twitter should get that long-awaited ‘edit’ button may seem like a bit of fun, there is no denying that his involvement with the social media company can significantly shake up the markets.
