Elon Musk slammed Twitter on Thursday afternoon amid reports that it may block his attempt to buy the company after he offered to purchase the company outright for more than $43 billion.
Twitter’s board of “directors are weighing whether to move ahead with the poison pill — formally called a shareholder rights plan — that would limit the ability of a single shareholder, like Mr. Musk, to acquire a critical mass of shares in the open market and force the company into a sale,” The New York Times reported. The poison pill tactic of warding off unwanted hostile takeovers “essentially lets the company flood the market with new shares or allow existing shareholders other than the potential acquirer to buy shares at a discount,” which “dilutes the bidder’s stake and makes buying shares more expensive.”
Musk said during an interview on Thursday that he wanted to buy Twitter because his “strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”
“I don’t care about the economics at all,” Musk added.
Musk then took to Twitter to conduct a poll, asking if taking the company private at $54.20 per share should be up to the shareholders and not the board, to which 84% of more than 1.3 million respondents answered, “yes.”
Musk then responded to a question from Nick Short, Communications Director for the Claremont Institute, who asked on Twitter, “If the board of directors at @Twitter reject the offer made by @elonmusk , then wouldn’t the board be acting in direct opposition to the financial interests of their shareholders?”
“Absolutely,” Musk responded. “It would be utterly indefensible not to put this offer to a shareholder vote. They own the company, not the board of directors.”
Absolutely. It would be utterly indefensible not to put this offer to a shareholder vote. They own the company, not the board of directors.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2022
Musk then responded to a comment from entrepreneur Cameron Winklevoss about Twitter potentially using a poison pill to block Musk from taking over the company.
“Twitter is considering a poison pill to thwart @elonmusk ‘s offer,” Winklevoss wrote. “They would rather self-immolate than give up their censorship programs. This shows you how deeply committed they are to Orwellian control of the narratives and global discourse. Scary.”
“If the current Twitter board takes actions contrary to shareholder interests, they would be breaching their fiduciary duty,” Musk responded. “The liability they would thereby assume would be titanic in scale.”
If the current Twitter board takes actions contrary to shareholder interests, they would be breaching their fiduciary duty.
The liability they would thereby assume would be titanic in scale.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2022
Musk also posted a screenshot of Goldman Sachs’ Equity Research rating for Twitter, which stated that the company was a “Sell” stock as it was falling behind performance forecasts.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2022
Related: