Musk Won’t Join Twitter’s Board Of Directors After All

April 11, 2022 Business, Social Media

CNBC reports:

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has abandoned his plans to join the board of Twitter, his social network of choice. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced publicly on Sunday that Musk remains the largest shareholder of Twitter, and the company will remain open to his input.

Musk informed Twitter on Saturday morning that he would not, in fact, take the board seat. The Twitter CEO did not say whether Musk gave specific reasons for changing his mind about taking on the new obligation.

The New York Times reports:

Musk had been tweeting erratically throughout the weekend, polling his followers with barbed questions about the future of the social media company. In one post on Saturday, Mr. Musk asked, “Is Twitter dying?”

In another, he suggested turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter because “no one shows up anyway.” He also rattled off a stream of critiques of the company’s products, at one point suggesting that Twitter remove ads from the service entirely. (Most of Twitter’s revenue comes from ads.)

Under corporate governance principles, board members are required to act in the best fiduciary interest of a company and its shareholders, which Mr. Agrawal pointed out in his tweet on Sunday evening.

Fortune reports:



By turning down the appointment, Musk is now free to expand his stake in Twitter. If Musk had accepted the seat on Twitter’s board, he would have been limited to a maximum stake of 14.9% in the company.

Without that limit, Musk could now—in theory—pursue a hostile takeover by buying the company outright. A move his extraordinary wealth comfortably enables him to do.

“Twitter is more vulnerable than some of its Internet peers to outside pressure because its founders don’t have special voting control,” Justin Post, director of equity research at Bank of America Securities, wrote in a note published last week.

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