Twitter Has Lost All of Its Stock Gains Since Elon Musk Disclosed Stake

Elon Musk arrives at the In America: An Anthology of Fashion themed Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York, on May 2, 2022. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

Since Elon Musk purchased a significant share in Twitter several weeks ago, the company has given up all its gains.

Last month, Musk disclosed that he bought a 9 percent stake in the social media platform. But as of Monday afternoon, shares of Twitter dropped another 6 percent, sending its price down to $38.25—the lowest closing price it’s had since April 1, or the last trading session before Musk revealed he took the 9 percent minority ownership of the company.

About three weeks later, Musk and Twitter’s board announced the billionaire would purchase the company for $44 billion.

Late last week, Musk said that the deal to buy Twitter was placed on hold until he finds out more details about fake accounts and bots that are present on the platform. Hours later, he wrote that he’s “still committed to acquisition.”

“You are being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you don’t realize. Easy to switch back & forth to see the difference,” he wrote on Saturday in a Twitter post. “I’m not suggesting malice in the algorithm, but rather that it’s trying to guess what you might want to read and, in doing so, inadvertently manipulate/amplify your viewpoints without you realizing this is happening.”

When a user asked Musk to “elaborate on process of filtering bot accounts,” he replied: “I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.”

Musk posted during the early hours of Sunday that he has yet to see any analysis that shows that the social media company has fake accounts of fewer than 5 percent. He later said, “There is some chance it might be over 90 percent of daily active users.”

Twitter on Thursday told news outlets that it would freeze hiring, while confirming that two top executives were let go from the company, including its head of consumer product Kayvon Beykpour. CEO Parag Agarwal asked him to leave, according to Beykpour in a series of Twitter posts.

“Some have been asking why a ‘lame-duck’ CEO would make these changes if we’re getting acquired anyway,” Agarwal wrote in a series of tweets. “While I expect the deal to close, we need to be prepared for all scenarios.”

Meanwhile, Musk confirmed last week that he would allow President Donald Trump to return to Twitter after the deal is finished, although Trump has said he wouldn’t return to Twitter because he wants to stay on his own platform, Truth Social.

“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth,” Trump told Fox News in April. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it, and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth.”

Reuters contributed to this report.