By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) stock surged by over 26% in premarket trading Monday after a regulatory filing revealed Elon Musk owns a 9.2% stake in the social media platform, potentially making the maverick CEO of Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) the largest shareholder in the social media platform.
Twitter has an equity base of almost 799 million shares.
Musk is a prolific Twitter user, tweeting several times a day, using the platform to make announcements, talk about Bitcoin and other cryptos, take feedback on just about anything, and attend to complaints by customers of the electric vehicle maker.
His penchant to tweet and make stock-price-sensitive announcements have also landed him in the crosshairs of the regulators more than once.
He has more than 80.1 million followers on the microblogging site.
Lately, Musk has been critical of Twitter for failing to adhere to free speech.
In a March 25 tweet, he posted a poll and asked his voters to say ‘yes/no’ if they believed Twitter rigorously adheres to the principle of free speech?
At the same time, Musk and Twitter's billionaire co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey have shared some camaraderie on the platform while dismissing the so-called Web3, a term for a decentralized version of the internet that is still evolving.