Elon Musk asks Twitter users to vote on changes to the site after becoming largest shareholder

Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal cautions users to ‘vote carefully’

On Monday, Elon Musk disclosed a 9.2 per cent stake in the company worth nearly $3bn, making him the largest shareholder (AP)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has bought a multibillion-dollar stake in Twitter, has begun asking users what changes they would like to see on the site.

“Do you want an edit button?” he wrote on Twitter late on Monday, asking people to vote yes or no.

Twitter users have for years asked for an edit button as the platform does not allow any changes after a tweet is posted.

The poll came just hours after he disclosed a 9.2 per cent stake in the company, worth nearly $3bn, making him the site’s largest shareholder and triggering a rise of more than 27 per cent in the company’s shares.

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing published on Monday, Musk owns 73,486,938 Twitter shares.

Reacting to the poll, Twitter’s chief executive officer Parag Agarwal cautioned users to “vote carefully”.

“The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully,” Mr Agarwal said, repeating Musk’s statement from a few days ago when he first began questioning Twitter’s commitment to free speech.

Mr Musk is one of Twitter’s most popular users, with more than 80 million followers. He is also particularly prolific, using his account to share memes as well as update on his life and his companies.

Those tweets have however caused problems for Mr Musk in the past. In 2018, for instance, he tweeted that Tesla would go private – starting a period that saw him investigated by the SEC as well as the loss of his position as chair of the company.

In recent weeks, Mr Musk has used his account to post about Twitter itself, and the rules that govern it.

On 24 March, he tweeted about being “worried about de facto bias in ‘the Twitter algorithm’ having a major effect on public discourse”, and shared a poll inviting his followers to vote on whether that algorithm should be open source.

A day later, he tweeted that “free speech is essential to a functioning democracy”, and polled his followers on whether they thought “Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle”. After 70.4 per cent of respondents voted that it did not, he asked followers “what should be done?”

He had at that time urged users to vote “carefully” as the “consequences of this poll will be important”.

Musk, however, bought his Twitter shares before those posts – filings with the SEC indicate the purchase happened on 14 March – though they were only disclosed on Monday.

The billionaire has posted several Twitter polls in the past and has been very vocal on Twitter.