Elon Musk Joins Twitter’s Board Of Directors…. And Then Decides Not To Join Twitter’s Board Of Directors
You might recall that last week Elon Musk as in the guy behind SpaceX and Tesla became the single biggest shareholder of Twitter stock. This led to him apparently joining the board last week. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said he was “excited to share” that Musk was joining the board, adding that “through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value” to the Board.”
Just less than a week later, that apparently won’t happen based on this Tweet:
You have to wonder what happened. Because parsing the statement above leads to some interesting questions. Specifically this statement for starters:
We also believed that having Elon as a fiduciary of the company where he, like all board members, has to act in the best interests of the company and all our shareholders, was the best path forward. The board offered him a seat.
The use of the word “fiduciary” is interesting. That word is defined as “a person who holds a legal or ethical relationship of trust with one or more other parties (person or group of persons).” Which makes sense seeing that Twitter is a public company. Then there’s this part of the statement:
We announced on Tuesday that Elon would be appointed to the Board contingent on a background check and formal acceptance.
I am not sure why they would mention that he has to go through a background check in a statement like this. Combine that with the previous line and you start to wonder if something happened behind the scenes that caused him to pull out. As in Twitter came across something that made him joining the board a non starter. Such as his well documented bad behaviour when it comes to saying and doing stuff that runs counter to being part of a public company. I’m not sure what the reason is, but you don’t put language into a statement that could have been as short as “Elon won’t be joining the Twitter board” unless you are sending some sort of message.
So where does this go from here? Maybe he goes away. Or maybe he decides to do a hostile takeover of Twitter. I don’t know. But I’ll be watching as this story is far from over.
April 14, 2022 at 8:19 am
[…] might recall that recently Elon Musk bought 10% of Twitter stock. Then he was named to the board of Twitter, but only briefly as he pulled out of that days later. At the time I said […]