The Tweet had been “liked” more than 140,000 times by Friday afternoon.

Mr Musk, who has built the electric car company Tesla into a global force and revolutionised the industry in the process, announced his bid on Thursday days after taking a 9pc stake in the company. He initially accepted a board seat before changing tack and turning down the offer to become a director.

The mercurial 50-year-old has insisted that the move is not about making money. He claims to want to turn the company into more of a platform for free speech, and believes it would be better off out of the public markets.

Critics of Twitter claim that it has become a left-wing echo chamber. The site has been accused of stifling alternative viewpoints, with the banning of former US president Donald Trump following the Capitol Hill riots in 2021 one such example.

Speaking in Vancouver on Thursday, Mr Musk said: “This is not a way to sort of make money. My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive, is extremely important to the future of civilization.”

It comes amid doubts over the growth prospects of the micro-blogging platform, which has about 217 million daily users and generated $5bn in revenue last year, but has posted lower-than-expected increases in users over the last few months.

Mr Musk’s offer, which he says is “full and final”, has already been publicly rejected by one major shareholder. The Saudi Arabian prince Alwaleed bin Talal argued it does not “come close to the intrinsic value of Twitter given its growth prospects”.

This criticism prompted a barbed response from Musk: