We had been girding ourselves this morning for a less-than-electrifying start to a new trading week. We follow last week’s jobs reports numbers with playing the waiting game ahead of the deluge of Q1 earnings reports coming next week and beyond. Economic data — new factory and equipment orders — isn’t coming out until after the open, and they won’t be as insightful as jobs numbers, anyway.
The Elon Musk stepped up: the
Tesla
TSLA
CEO announced this morning he’s bought himself a 9.2% stake in
Twitter
TWTR
. This move has caused Twitter shares to surge more than +22% in today’s pre-market. Now that’s a good way to start a week, if you’re a Twitter shareholder.
Twitter stock had been down, much as we’ve seen many tech-oriented companies over this year-long rotation into cyclicals and out of growth plays: the company is -7.85% year to date, -38.8% from this point last year. So from an investment perspective, one may see this move from the world’s richest man, Musk, as buying stake in a company at a great price — they way we have seen decades-worth of Warren Buffett trades swooping in when useful companies take a dive in market price.
But Musk has referred to Twitter as the “de facto public square,” and used the social media platform to talk about free speech (and the lack of it) in today’s society. Yet he’s particularly listed as a “passive” investor — this is not an activist board-takeover maneuver, as we might see from a Carl Icahn or Bill Ackman. However, with such a big bite of the company, any future moves in this direction may change the game a bit.
We don’t yet have a clear picture of what Musk is thinking, but market participants have learned long ago that one doubts his big moves at their own peril. This is one of the biggest thinkers of our day; it’s assumed he’s got something in mind with his new large stake in one of the biggest social media companies in the world. We’ll all do well to stay tuned.
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