No Stupid Questions

Twitter is private, there's no public shares anymore. The number you found was his stake before he purchased all the shares and before Twitter was taken off the markets.

Yes you need to have 50%+1 share to have complete control over a company.

Twitter probably still has shareholders, but that's between Musk and them. Think about Shark Tank, when they say "I'll offer X$ in exchange for Y% of the company." Well Musk had to get the money to buy Twitter from somewhere.

Didn't he buy the whole thing in a hostile takeover? That means no more publicly traded shares and he owns the whole thing. Probably through some complicated holdings construction but ultimately he owns it fully.

He owned 9% of stock before the takeover. His price was way high, which is why he attempted to get out of it. And no shareholder complained as they got a good return on their investment.

As far as I understand a lot of the finances came from different sources, like the Saudis. But the agreements around those aren't public, so I don't think anyone knows exactly if they can demand anything except money and what the rules are for Musk. Unless that's been confirmed leaked, but I don't care enough about Musk or Twitter to keep tabs on that.

As others have said, you are likely running off an old metric that's no longer true. Twitter / X is considered a privately traded company meaning that the shares that are owned aren't publicly given anymore, he owns at least the majority of the private shares, however he stated he owns 100% of it.

While he has control of the company because he's the owner, he hasn't fully paid for the company if that makes sense. Most of his purchase for the company was done by using his other stocks as collateral to be able to take out loans from the banks.

This is why the article the other day came up of major banks are trying to sell his loans for cheaper than what they're actually worth, because they're no longer confident that Elon as a whole is going to be able to foot the bill like he said he was able to. (Honestly unless trump bails it out it's a valid concern)

Since he owns the company, he can make any decision he wants regarding the company, there is no publicly known shareholders have any decision. Now this isn't to say that there isn't privately owned shareholders, but since it's a privately owned company they're not obligated to disclose those percentages.

So Musk owns twitter so there is no stock anymore. He does have loans for the purchase which are probably backed by his twitter ownership and his Tesla stock.

However there is another way to not have majority ownership and still have majority voting power. Google has class A and class B shares. Each class A share gets 10 votes and class B shares get 1 vote.

Only the founders of Google got class A shares and if they are transferred to anyone but another founder they revert to class B shares. So they have a minority ownership and a majority vote.

He owns 100% and is not publicly trading them

Companies can have shares in multiple ways. For example, voting and non-voting.

Alternately, a company can have shares that get more votes then others, so the owner of a company could, say, have 10% of shares, but those shares have 10x voting power. Thats how the WWE used to be before it was bought out.

The business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company, to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25.

Ex-Twitter isn't a good example of how shares work in general. For this company, I recommend the wiki here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp.

To your other question: if you own >50% then the others have no real say anymore. If you own less than 50% then you can still try to convince them of your ideas, and in practice, there is often one who commands and the others follow.