Lei Jianping reported on April 5
According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure documents, Tesla CEO Elon Musk already holds 9.2% of Twitter's common stock.
Musk holds 9.2 percent of Twitter's common stock
According to Twitter's data at the end of 2021, Twitter's single largest shareholder was VANGUARD GROUPINC (Pioneer Investment), holding 8.8%.
That means Musk replaced Vanguard as Twitter's single largest shareholder.
On April 4, 2022, U.S. time, Twitter also signed a letter agreement (the "Agreement") with Elon Musk, which states:
Twitter will appoint Musk to the company's board of directors for a term that expires at the company's 2024 annual meeting of shareholders.
The agreement also stipulates that as long as Musk serves on the Board of Directors and for 90 days thereafter, Musk will not be the beneficial owner of more than 14.9% of the Company's outstanding common shares, either alone or as a member of the Group.
Control the position of public opinion
Forbes also released the 2022 global billionaire list, the 50-year-old Musk wealth reached 219 billion US dollars, pushing Amazon founder Bezos to continue to become the world's richest man. Musk's wealth is mainly based on Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk's wealth has increased by $68 billion over the past year. Musk also concentrated on dumping a large number of volatile, more than $16 billion tesla shares in the two months of 2021, and thus may have created the largest amount of personal annual tax bills ever created.
As the world's richest man, why did Musk buy Twitter heavily?
If you look at financial returns, Twitter's return on investment over the past two years has not performed well, with a cumulative loss of nearly $1.5 billion. Institutional investors, unhappy that Dorse is also the CEO of both Twitter and Square, continues to pressure Dorse to resign and let Twitter go.
Twitter founder Dorsey
Eventually, Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO in December 2021 and announced his retirement from the board, completely fading out of Twitter operations and focusing on Square's CEO role.
On another level, Musk is a heavy Twitter user, with more than 80 million followers, whether it is For Tesla, SpaceX, StarLink or myself, Twitter is an extremely important voice window.
In the past two years, Musk has frequently "brought goods" on Twitter, speculating on Bitcoin and Dogecoin. The stake in Twitter also led to a sharp rise in Twitter's stock price.
Of course, Musk has also caused trouble on Twitter many times because of speech problems, and the SEC has asked that his remarks on Twitter need to be approved by other Tesla executives, but Musk did not take it seriously, and recently he asked the court to revoke the SEC's restrictions on him, but the SEC opposed Musk's request, emphasizing that Musk could not avoid the SEC's review of his related tweets.
When Trump was the president of the United States, he promoted Twitter governance, and he could convey his ideas and ideas to the audience most directly and without being distorted. When Trump was still the president of the United States, Twitter was able to block the account of the president of the United States, in a so-called free speech Western society, which was unimaginable in the past, and we can also see the power of Twitter.
Musk is also unhappy with Twitter, which came after March 25 that he was seriously considering building a new social media platform and questioned twitter's current restrictions on free speech.
Possible intervention in Twitter management
After having enough wealth, it is not difficult to understand how to increase the influence and even control of Twitter.
In fact, Alibaba in China also invested in Weibo many years ago, and was once a shareholder of more than 30% of Weibo's shares. When Jiang Fan Zhang Dayi incident occurred, Weibo's public opinion was affected.
In the Western money society, Musk's motivation for investing in Twitter is not difficult to understand. After all, Bezos bought the Washington Post for hundreds of millions of dollars, and Microsoft also owns Microsoft NBC.
Foreign media also disclosed Musk's possible motives. For example, Cathy Wood, the founder of Ark Investment Management and a "female stock goddess," speculates that Musk's stake in Twitter could open the door to a management reshuffle at the company.
The reason is that Twitter's incoming CEO Dorsey is a good friend that Musk admires, and Musk has publicly supported Dorsey, but he does not like Twitter's current CEO Agavar, and even uses old historical photos of Stalin and Yezov, P on the heads of Agaval and Dorsey, alluding to Twitter's drive away Dorsey.
At this time, Musk suddenly took over the position of Twitter's largest shareholder, and did not rule out the attempt to intervene in management by increasing influence on Twitter's board of directors.
Compared with the Western supremacy of money society, China is very different, in the past two years, the regulatory authorities have strengthened anti-monopoly and prevented the disorderly expansion of capital, and a typical feature is that Ali has continued to withdraw from the media it has invested in.
Among them, in March 2022, Ant Group sold all its shares in 36Kr and completely withdrew from its shareholder sequence. In October 2021, Ant Group sold all its shares in Caixin Media and completely withdrew from the investment. Alibaba also withdrew from Mango Media.
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Lei Di was founded by veteran media person Lei Jianping, if reprinted, please indicate the source.