Elon Musk has big plans for Twitter…Elon Musk just became the single largest shareholder of social media giant Twitter. That alone has set financial media ablaze. And this is about something much bigger than just investment gains… Regulatory filings revealed Musk's 9.2% ownership stake on Monday. He carefully accumulated 73,486,938 shares of Twitter (TWTR) in the open market. For context, that's four times the stake owned by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. It's even larger than institutional giant Vanguard Group's position. As we would expect, the market loved this move. Twitter's share price spiked 26% immediately after the news broke. And as I write, TWTR is now up 31% on the week. This means that Musk has already made over $800 million on his investment. Even so, that's not his primary motivation here. Instead, this appears to be a premeditated move to gain control over Twitter. We can see this in Musk's cryptic tweets from last week: Elon Musk's Tweets 
Source: Twitter Here we can see that Musk conducted a poll concerning Twitter's support for free speech last month. He even suggested that the results of the poll would have consequences. And as we can see, over 70% of participants – more than 1.4 million people – said that Twitter does not adhere to the principle of free speech. That prompted this: 
Source: Twitter Here Musk acknowledged that Twitter has failed on the free speech issue, and he asked if we needed a new platform – sparking a lot of speculation about whether Musk would attempt to create his own social media company. But now Musk has revealed his true card: Why start from scratch if you can fix what's already built? Twitter has egregiously censored information and opinions that run counter to the mainstream narrative in recent years. It's even banned prominent individuals from using the platform. That list includes former president Donald Trump, who was a sitting president at the time. That's what this is all about. Musk is an ardent supporter of free speech. He often leans hard into libertarian principles. And he is working to restore free speech to Twitter. He considers it a modern town square – the central location where neighbors gather to share information, opinions, and news. I believe Musk is working to align with a handful of other large investors to gain control of Twitter's board of directors. Control is the key. Even though he can, Musk doesn't need to buy Twitter outright. If he can control the board, he can put a stop to Twitter's overreach and restore free speech to the platform. And sure enough, Twitter announced that Musk will join its board yesterday. That's the first domino to drop. We'll see if Musk can build or bring in a strategic coalition from here. If not, he can always buy the company outright. We may wonder – why would Twitter give Musk a seat at the table given his harsh criticisms? The answer is that board members cannot own more than 14.9% of the company's outstanding shares. Twitter is effectively ensuring that Musk doesn't buy a controlling interest in the company. So this is going to be a thrilling story to follow. I'm excited by this move as it represents some hope for open discourse and an end to the deplatforming of individuals and banning of scientific research. If we can have at least one of the major social media platforms free of censorship, that would be a huge improvement over how our information is currently manipulated and filtered today. As regular readers know, I am also a big believer in free speech. I'm very happy to see Musk taking a stand here. We need to hold Twitter and "Big Tech" accountable for their transgressions. By Jeff Brown | 
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