Elon Musk, now Twitter's main shareholder, appointed to board of directors and calls for edit button

Elon Musk will join Twitter's board of directors, company CEO Parag Agrawal announced in a tweet on Tuesday.

"He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term," Agrawal said.

On Monday, filings revealed that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO had bought a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter, worth nearly $3 billion (€2.7 billion).

The purchase makes him Twitter's largest shareholder and sent shares soaring by more than 27 per cent after it was made public.

Musk joins fellow board members including Agrawal, company founder Jack Dorsey, co-CEO of Salesforce Bret Taylor and British peer Martha Lane Fox.

Hours after his shareholding in Twitter was made public on Monday, Musk posted a poll asking users of the micro-blogging platform if they wanted an edit button.

"Do you want an edit button?" Musk asked in a tweet later in the day.

By Tuesday morning, more than 2.2 million users had voted, with close to 75 per cent of them backing an edit option.

Replying to Musk's poll, Twitter CEO Agrawal tweeted that the consequences of the poll will be important. "Please vote carefully," he said.

On April 1, Twitter had tweeted a message on its official account saying it was working on the long-awaited "edit" feature.

When asked if the tweet was an April Fool's joke, the company had then said: "We cannot confirm or deny but we may edit our statement later".

Musk's move, revealed in a regulatory filing, comes on the heels of his tweet that he was giving "serious thought" to building a new social media platform, while questioning Twitter's commitment to free speech.

Last week, in another poll, Musk had asked if Twitter's algorithm should be open