TechScape: What does Elon Musk want with Twitter?

theguardian.com:

“If you can’t beat them, join them” is loser talk. If you can’t beat them, buy 10% of them, and then they’re the ones who have to beat you.

That, at least, seems to have been Elon Musk’s conclusion, after he ended a month of whining about the social network, on the social network, with a $2.9bn purchase of 9.2% of the social network.

From the Guardian:

Elon Muskhas built up a 9.2% stake in Twitter, according to filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday.

Twittershares jumped 26% in pre-market trading on the back of the news that the world’s richest person holds shares worth almost $3bn in the micro-bloggingplatform.

Musk, the maverick boss of Tesla and SpaceX who has an estimated $273bn (£208bn) fortune, owned 73,486,938 Twittershares on 14 March according to the filing. Those shares were worth just under $2.9bn based on Friday’s closing price, but will now be worth about $3.6bn.

There’s scant further information about the purchase for the time being. The SEC filing, a form called Schedule 13G, is mandatory for anyone who takes control of more than 5% of a given company (which means that, theoretically, Musk could have owned 4.9% of Twitter before now without needing to disclose it). And, crucially, it requires you to commit to being a passive investor. Which is why it was somewhat odd that Twitter’s chief executive Parag Agrawal announced on Tuesday that Musk would be taking up a board seat:

Musk is a committed user of Twitter. A very committed user. Let’s have a brief overview of