Elon Musk, Twitter’s largest shareholder, asks users if they want an edit button

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has wasted no time making his Twitter feature priorities clear after becoming its biggest shareholder on Saturday. The Tesla CEO has polled his 80 million followers about whether they’d like to be able to edit their tweets after posting them.

Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal subsequently quote-tweeted Musk’s poll to say: “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” 

The phrasing mirrors a similar tweet from Musk about free speech on March 25, days after he acquired almost 10 per cent of the company.

The so-called “edit button” has been one of the most commonly requested features of the platform. In an ideal world it would simply allow users to clean up typos after publishing their tweets, but critics claim the feature could be ripe for abuse, allowing users to substantially change the meaning of tweets after they’ve been shared. Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey said that the company would “probably never” add an edit button in an interview in early 2020.

A prolific Twitter user, Musk 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, he has been critical of the social media platform and its policies, and had recently ran a Twitter poll asking users if they believed the platform adheres to the principle of free speech, to which over 70 per cent voted “no”.

Musk, according to Forbes, has a net worth of about $300 billion