Of Course Elon Musk Wanted Twitter
Updated at 8:40 p.m. ET on April 5, 2022.
Long before the rockets and the electric cars, before the high-speed trains and the brain implants and the flamethrowers, Elon Musk was in the content business.
In 1996, Zip2, the company he’d founded with his brother, started courting newspapers with a service that would allow them to build online directories of classified ads, real-estate listings, car deals, and entertainment events. The internet was still new and mysterious, and news organizations around the country were glad to have help getting online. Even The New York Times signed up. The business was so lucrative that the Musk brothers moved Zip2 into a bigger office to make room for all their new employees.
Now Musk has found himself in the content business once again, this time as Twitter’s largest shareholder and, as of this morning, a newly appointed board member. The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla has purchased a 9.2 percent stake in the social-media platform, worth about $2.89 billion, based on the closing price of Twitter’s stock on Friday. Twitter’s share price surged more than 27 percent in response, and by the end of Monday, Musk’s investment was .
