Elon Musk buys $2.9bn stake in Twitter to become biggest shareholder

The billionaire Elon Musk has taken an almost $3bn (£2.3bn) stake in Twitter to become the social media platform’s largest shareholder.

The world’s richest man, who has a penchant for eccentric behaviour frequently involving posts on Twitter, has built a 9.2% stake in Twitter, according to filings made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday.

The boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who with more than 80 million followers ranks in the top 10 most popular Twitter users globally, paid $2.89bn for the stake at Twitter’s closing share price on Friday.

Shares in the microblogging site soared as much as 26% in pre-market trading on the back of the news, adding more than $8bn to its $31.5bn market value before Musk’s interest was made public. After the stock price jump Musk’s shares are now worth about $3.6bn.

Musk, who just last week said he was “giving serious thought” to building his own social media platform, now holds a stake more than four times the 2.25% holding of the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.