OREANDA-NEWS.  Ark Invest founder Katie Wood has bought about 1.1 million shares of Twitter, company data for Tuesday, 30 November shows. The purchase amounted to $48.9 million, based on Tuesday's closing price of $43.94 per share.

The social network paper was the fund's largest acquisition since 23 July this year, and the first transaction in Twitter shares in about a month.

Shares of Twitter were bought by the Ark Innovation ETF (623,221 shares), Ark Next Generation Internet ETF (161,991 shares) and Ark Fintech Innovation ETF (327,160 shares). As a result, the weight of Twitter shares in these funds combined reached 7.72%.

Katie Wood began buying the social network's securities amid a steep decline in their prices: over two days - November 29 and 30 - the shares lost a combined 6.7%. The company began to decline on Monday on the news that CEO Jack Dorsey had left his post and CTO Parag Argawal had been appointed in his place.

Until now, Jack Dorsey has been CEO of two companies at once - Twitter and fintech Square. The market initially reacted positively to the news of Dorsey's departure, with shares jumping 11% in early trading on Monday.
The Dorsey era at Twitter was a period of one of the biggest rises for US tech stocks, but Twitter missed much of it. Bloomberg noted that during the leadership of Dorsey, who took over Twitter six years ago, the social network's shares rose by just 75%.

During the same time, the NASDAQ 100 index rose more than 280%, while the S&P 500 jumped nearly 140%. Apple is up more than 450%, Amazon is up 580%, Alphabet is up about 345% and Microsoft is up 640%. Meanwhile, Square, which was also founded by Jack Dorsey, has seen its value increase by more than 2000% since its IPO in 2015.

Last February, one of the social network's shareholders, investment firm Elliott Management, reported plans to push for changes to Twitter, including the departure of Jack Dorsey, Bloomberg wrote. Elliott Management pushed for the ouster in part because Dorsey's attention was split between running Twitter and cloud service Square, but also because of his desire to move to Africa and work there up to six months a year.