Boss of the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and the space flight company SpaceX, Elon Musk put Twitter into orbit on Monday after making public a major stake in the social network.

The latter, however, accuses him of restricting freedom of expression.

An action that flies away

In the middle of the day, the action of the microblogging site soared by about 20%, to 47.21 dollars, in electronic trading preceding the opening of Wall Street.

According to a filing with the SEC, US stock market regulator Musk, who is the richest man on the planet, acquired nearly 73.5 million shares of Twitter common stock, or 9.2% of the stock market value of the company.

This makes him the largest shareholder in the group ahead of the investment fund Vanguard (8.8%) and the bank Morgan Stanley (8.4%), according to data from Bloomberg.

Based on Friday's closing price of Twitter's stock, the South African-born billionaire's investment is nearly $2.9 billion.

A follower of the social network

Musk speaks very frequently on the platform, where he has just over 80 million subscribers.

His announcements on the tweet network frequently arouse controversy.

In the summer of 2018, he notably published a tweet where he claimed to have the appropriate funding to withdraw Tesla from the New York Stock Exchange, without providing proof.

After an unfortunate new publication in early 2019, he agreed to have his posts directly related to the electric vehicle maker's business pre-cleared by the SEC.

The leader had also given up his position as chairman of the board of directors of Tesla.

Freedom of expression

The billionaire boss is also critical of the measures put in place by Twitter to moderate certain content deemed inappropriate.

At the end of March, Musk published two polls on the social network, one to ask his followers if they thought that Twitter's algorithm should be in open source code (“open source”), the other to know s they believed the company respected freedom of expression.

Voters overwhelmingly answered “yes” to the first poll and “no” to the second.

"Given that Twitter acts as a de facto public square, its failure to adhere to the principles of free speech fundamentally undermines democracy," the Tesla boss tweeted following the results.

Twitter is regularly accused of censorship by many conservative voices in the United States, especially since the suspension of Donald Trump's account last year.

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