Musk winds his neck in, for now, after weekend tweet frenzy

The enigma that is Tesla and Starlink founder Elon Musk seems to have decided to treat social media company Twitter as a giant plaything.

A week ago it was revealed that Musk had decided to splash sufficient cash to become Twitter’s largest single shareholder. The company’s share price spiked immediately but opinion was divided about the nature of Musk’s potential influence on the company. Considering he’s one of the richest and most prominent people in the world, Musk’s public image, especially via Twitter, can be surprisingly eccentric and erratic.

The most recent tweet about Twitter currently showing on Musk’s timeline is embedded below. The question, even if meant rhetorically, is a strange one for someone who just spent almost three billion bucks on stock in the company in question. Having said that, he could have simply been publicly pondering the matter of lapsed major Twitter accounts, you just never know with this bloke.

Then things got really funky. Musk seemed to lose all inhibition and embarked on a sequence of stream-of-conscious tweets about the company. In one he publicly mulled significant changes to the platform, in another he asked if its HQ should be converted to a homeless shelter since no workers seem to use it. Then, apparently conforming all this was just a bit of fun to him, he polled Twitter to see if the ‘w’ should be removed from the company name. All of those tweets have subsequently been deleted.

It seems fair to assume the other Twitter shareholders and its executive team may have struggled to see the funny side of Musk’s weekend antics. His shareholding apparently entitled Musk to a seat on the Twitter board, which was duly offered to him last week. According to the tweet below, Musk initially accepted and then, on the day of his Twitter outburst, changed his mind. It’s easy to see why CEO Parag Agrawal thinks that’s for the best.

It remains anyone’s guess what Musk is up to, especially since doesn’t seem to have issued any public response to the above announcement, but even the richest man in the world doesn’t chuck three billion dollars into a company just for a laugh, surely. Twitter’s share price has retreated a bit from its initial spike and this must be an especially tricky situation for investors to interpret. For the rest of us it at least represents some good corporate sport.

Image credit: YouTube.

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