Twitter adds Elon Musk to its board days after a $2.9 billion stock buy

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has confirmed that the company has now added Tesla CEO Elon Musk to its board. The move comes days after he bought almost $3 billion worth of shares in the company.

The announcement came via Twitter — where else? — with Agrawal saying that Musk will "bring great value" to the company's board.

I'm excited to share that we're appointing @elonmusk to our board! Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board.

Musk recently spent $2.9 billion on Twitter stock in a move that was confirmed yesterday. At the time, analysts suggested that the buy was the precursor to bigger things. Sure enough, 24 hours later, Musk has been added to the Twitter board. The AP reported that Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities was already expecting something similar yesterday.

"We would expect this passive stake as just the start of broader conversations with the Twitter board/management that could ultimately lead to an active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter," Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said in a client note early Monday.

It's still too early to tell what this will mean for one of the world's most popular social networks, but given Musk's vocal complaints about the way Twitter handles free speech we can surely expect him to apply pressure — rightly, or wrongly.

To that end, Musk has already suggested that he intends to help make "improvements" to Twitter — although what they will be, we will have to wait and see.

Hopefully, those improvements will relate to the company's iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. Far from the best Mac app for reading tweets, the official Twitter app could definitely use some work.