Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board

Twitter Inc said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday its top shareholder and Tesla boss Elon Musk will be appointed to the company's board.

Twitter said that it entered into an agreement with Musk on Monday that will give the billionaire a seat on its board, with the term expiring at its 2024 annual shareholders meeting.

Musk, either alone or as a member of a group, won't be allowed to own more than 14.9% of Twitter's outstanding stock for as long as he's a board member and for 90 days after.

Earlier on Monday, Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc, worth nearly $3 billion, making him the micro-blogging site's largest shareholder and triggering a rise of more than 27% in the company's shares.

Twitter shares surged as much as 27% after Musk’s purchase was revealed. The gain marked the stock’s biggest intraday increase since its first day of trading following the company’s 2013 initial public offering. The stake is worth about $2.89 billion, based on Friday’s market close.

He also started a poll asking Twitter users if they want an edit button, a long-awaited feature on which the social media platform has been working. It was followed by Chief Executive Parag Agrawal urging users to "vote carefully".

In less than three hours of starting the poll, more than 1.2 million users voted, with over 75% of them backing an edit option.

Musk, 50, polled his more than 80 million followers on Twitter last month as well, asking them whether the company adheres to the principles of free speech. 

After more than 70% said no, he asked whether a new platform was needed and said he was giving serious thought to starting his own.

A prolific Twitter user, Musk has over 80 million followers since joining the site in 2009 and has used the platform to make several announcements, including teasing a go-private deal for Tesla that landed him in hot water with regulators.

Of late, however, the world's richest person has been critical of the social media platform and its policies, and recently ran a Twitter poll asking users if they believed the platform adheres to the principle of free speech, to which over 70% voted "no."

In December, Musk put out a meme that compared CEO Agrawal with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and showed Jack Dorsey as a close associate who was later on executed.

Twitter's latest quarterly results and lower-than-expected user additions have raised doubts about its growth prospects, even as it pursues big projects such as audio chat rooms and newsletters to end long-running stagnation.