Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc., owns 9.2 percent of Twitter Inc, according to a regulatory filing on Monday, potentially making him the biggest stakeholder in the microblogging site.
Following the filing, Twitter shares jumped 26 percent in premarket trading, just days after Musk tweeted that he was considering building a new social media platform.
Meta Platforms and Snap Inc, the company that owns Snapchat, were also trading higher.
A stock price of $2.9 billion on Friday would value Musk’s passive stake in Twitter at up to $73.5 million. The shares are held in the Elon Musk Revocable Trust.
Musk has amassed over 80 million followers since joining Twitter in 2009, and he has used the service to tease a takeover plan for Tesla that landed him in hot water with regulators.
Recently, however, he has criticized the social media platform and its policies and said that the company fails to adhere to free speech principles, thus undermining democracy.
In the meantime, Musk and Twitter’s billionaire co-founder, Jack Dorsey, have come to some agreement on the idea of the Web3, a so-called decentralized version of the internet.
