Centibillionaire Elon Musk Becomes Twitter's Largest Shareholder, Company CEO Warns Against Musk's 'Edit Button' Poll

Elon Musk has taken a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the company's largest shareholder.

According to Forbes Real-time data, Musk is the richest man alive with a net worth of $302.1 billion.

The second-largest shareholding in Twitter is an 8.8% stake owned by the mutual-fund company Vanguard. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's founder and former CEO only owns 2.3% of the company.

With this, the Twitter stock (TWTR) gained 27.13% on Monday's trading session. This is the biggest intraday gain in the stock following its IPO listing in 2013. Musk's 73,486,938 shares in the social media platform are worth $2.89bn based on Twitter's closing price on Friday.

A regular Twitter user with more than 80 million followers, Musk said he is giving "serious thought" to building a new social media platform. Musk's move came less than two weeks after he criticized the company, polling people on Twitter about whether Twitter adheres to free speech principles.

“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” Musk had tweeted. “What should be done?”

After being the largest shareholder, Musk has now gone to the platform itself to poll on whether users want an edit button. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has tweeted: "The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully."