Elon Musk toys with Twitter hours after becoming its largest stakeholder: 'Do you want an edit button?'
Musk bought a 9% stake in Twitter earlier in the day
Elon Musk's Twitter stake electrifying markets
SlateStone Wealth chief market strategist Kenny Polcari and T3 Trading CSO Scott Redler analyze Twitter on 'The Claman Countdown.'
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, hours after buying a multibillion-dollar stake in Twitter, teased the world with the prospect of an edit button Monday.
The platform notoriously does not allow users to update their tweets.
The Tesla CEO owns 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, valued at $2.89 billion based on Friday's closing price of $39.31 a share. By the closing bell Monday, it had climbed by more than $10 per share.
He tweeted out a yes-or-no poll for the edit button, cheekily misspelling the choices as "yse" and "on" – a reference to users' inability to correct typos once tweets are sent. As of Monday evening, "yse" was winning with more than 75% of the vote.
ELON MUSK PURCHASES STAKE IN TWITTER AFTER SLAMMING ITS APPROACH TO ‘FREE SPEECH’
Musk, a prolific tweeter, asked his 80 million followers last month whether they believed Twitter adhered to the principle of free speech, which he said "is essential to a functioning democracy."
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TWTR | n.a. | n.a. | n.a. | n.a. |
| TSLA | TESLA INC. | 149.90 | -5.55 | -3.57% |
They overwhelmingly voted "no," and he floated the idea of founding a new social media platform. Then on Monday, he surprised the market by scooping up more than 9% of Twitter itself.
Critics have roasted Twitter in recent years over its alleged anti-conservative bias. The social media giant locked the New York Post’s official account during the 2020 presidential campaign when it reported the contents found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, then-candidate Joe Biden’s son.
Two years later, after initially dismissing the reporting as flimsy and possible Russian propaganda, mainstream media giants including the New York Times and the Washington Post have quietly confirmed the New York Post’s findings.
The latest edit button tweet comes days after Twitter’s official account floated the idea of one on April 1.
The idea of an edit button for tweets has been a controversial one for years – with supporters looking for a way to fix typos, among other things.
Twitter headquarters is seen in San Francisco, California, United States on October 27, 2021. Twitter has been testing several new features for its mobile app recently. The company is now working on an option to customize the navigation bar of the Tw (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in 2020 that the company would "probably never" implement such a feature.
But later, during the coronavirus pandemic, the official Twitter account tweeted "You can have an edit button when everyone wears a mask."
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Then on Friday, which was also April Fool’s Day, the company tweeted bluntly, "we are working on an edit button."
FOX Business’ Haley Chi-Sing contributed to this report.