Héloïse Goy, with Alexis Patri 10:23 a.m., April 05, 2022

American billionaire Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and Space X, is one of Twitter's most influential users.

With its 80 million subscribers, it has in recent days bought a large share of the shares of the social network, while posting messages critical of the direction it is taking.

It's a tidy sum of around 3 billion dollars: the American businessman Elon Musk has invested exactly 2.9 billion dollars in Twitter.

With this operation, the CEO of Tesla and Space X becomes the main shareholder of the company.

This takeover came as a surprise.

On Monday, Twitter's stock value jumped 25% when the New York Stock Exchange opened.

But does Elon Musk just want to do business or take control of the social network?

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Elon Musk is an avid Twitter user.

With his 80 million subscribers, he is one of the most followed personalities and therefore the most influential on the social network.

His account is even among the ten most followed in the world.

But the billionaire has recently been very critical with Twitter.

In particular, he published a survey ten days ago addressed to his subscribers where he asked "Do you believe that Twitter strictly adheres to the principle of freedom of expression?".

The no won by more than 70%.

The central question of editing tweets

In response, Elon Musk then asked his followers if it was necessary to "create a new social network".

And, since becoming Twitter's largest shareholder on Monday, the billionaire has already posted two tweets.

The first, very short: "oh hi lol" ("hey hello, haha").

In the second, the billionaire offers a poll to find out if his followers want a new feature that would edit tweets.

This potential feature is a crucial point for users of this social network.

If Elon Musk has not yet clearly expressed his intentions, this buyback of Twitter shares does seem to be part of a strategy to challenge the current policy of the social network.