Twitter would be a trophy for Elon Musk: advertising legend Sir Martin Sorrell

Is Elon Musk trophy hunting with his bid for Twitter? Read More...

Stock traders go whale hunting, billionaires often go trophy hunting.

And that appears to be what the CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX and The Boring Company Elon Musk appears to be doing with his splashy bid for Twitter.

“This, to my mind, is more of a trophy property play by Elon Musk. It will give him a strong voice,” said S4 Capital founder and advertising industry legend Sir Martin Sorrell on Yahoo Finance Live. Sorrell is also the founder of ad giant WPP.

Added Sorrell, “It’s a modern day Hearst or Murdoch using new media instead of old media, so no different from Jeff Bezos or Marc Benioff flirting with ‘Time’ or ‘The Washington Post.’ But this is just in the area of new media.”

The Tesla CEO, who has a 9.2% stake in Twitter, offered to buy the social media platform for $54.20 a share last week. Musk believes the platform should be less reliant on advertising sales and better police its content, among other initial ideas from the unpredictable visionary.

As to be expected, Twitter is hardly embracing Musk’s arrival.

Twitter has since enacted a poison pill to keep Musk from acquiring more of the company.

Wall Street is growing concerned the buyout battle could hurt Twitter’s ad sales in the coming quarters.

“We believe the latest development, if anything, is a major distraction for Twitter’s management team,” said Deutsche Bank analyst Benjamin Black.

Sorrell believes Twitter has a valuable audience, and may not be too weighed down by the battle with Musk.

“Well, there are a couple of million followers on Twitter or users of Twitter, daily average users. So it’s an effective platform at a small scale. I doubt whether it will hinder it much in the short term. We’ll see what happens,” Sorrell added.

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.