Elon Musk won't join Twitter's board after all SpaceX and Tesla tycoon Elon Musk won't be joining Twitter's board, despite last week revealing he had acquired a 9.2 per cent stake in the microblogging service. News of the change of heart came in a tweet from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who got straight to the point: "Elon has decided not to join our board. I sent a brief …
This. Musk has already discovered with Tesla that people who run publicly listed companies do not have the right to maximum free speech. Becoming a board director at Twitter would very likely have further limited his right to free speech.
Secondly, if Musk's 'vision' was to let Donald Trump, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and various terrorist organisations back on Twitter, while the investigations and trials for last year's coup attempt are still ongoing, that could have a disastrous effect on Twitter's capacity to do business.
It's not the binding of his free speech.
It's the binding of his maximum stock ownership.
I assume he plans to buy Twitter outright eventually.
For an analysis of his SEC filings with appropriate sections highlighted see
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/11/23020118/elon-musk-twitter-schedule-13d-social-media-board-of-directors-sec
It will be a waste if he buys enough stock to eventually take it over, and makes "maximal free speech" the law of the land. Its value will collapse as it slowly becomes a toxic hellscape like Gab (since all the truly toxic people sidelined to Gab will come back to Twitter once Musk pulls the door wide open for people who threaten violence, or worse)
But he has so much money I'm sure he doesn't care, he'll be happy that he can go back to calling people "pedo guy" if they fail to bow down to him properly.
I think this is what happened.
1) Musk told them he was planning to purchase a significant stake (apparently he held talks with the CEO for a while before it became public and before he purchased).
2) The board had to weigh various conflicts. Do we want an irritant outside the tent pissing in or inside the tent pissing out? Once he purchases the stock, can he be more of a nuisance as a vocal large shareholder or as a board member? In which position is he of best value to the company (considering Musk's primary skill is being a marketing machine but he's also a major liability)?
3) The board figured it was better for them to have Musk muzzled by fiduciary duties and SEC regulations so they offered him a board seat.
4) Once it became clear to Musk what it would really entail to be on the board, what the board demanded in return for his board seat, and what he could no longer do or say about Twitter, either he decided not to pursue it or the board said 'take it or leave it'.
I think there's also a paperwork issue. When the purchase was announced, the regulatory filing was for a passive investment. Many regulators have similar rules, ie if you buy a large stake, you're meant to notify the market if it's active or passive, and if it's a prelude to a buyout.
No idea what the SEC penalties would be for becoming actively involved in running your investment would be if the wrong forms were used.
Twitter probably offered him the place as a sop but in reality he would have created a massive headache if he had joined. How would it go down with shareholders if he was regularly boosting / denegrating crypto (for his own obvious financial benefit), 4am drunk / drug tweets or flat out calling people pedos? What if he crossed the line and said something worthy of a suspension (arguably something he has done many times) and still they refused to act? Their stock price would go up and down like a yoyo and there would be lawsuits galore from shareholders.
Anyway, the Onion says it best about Musk:
https://www.theonion.com/please-like-me-1848674003
That is good. Really good. I too thought that level of meta-awareness had been stomped out by the 'progressives'.
But then, he isn't THAT bad. He's much better than knobhead Jobs. And... many successful people have a desire to be liked and succeed.
Honestly, I dont think I could do as good a job a Elon as done with all that power and money. I know he drinks deeply from the Tony Stark well, but even so, if I had that power and money, you'd all be dead!!! LOL
And no ads. The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive.
I don't see how he expects Twitter to generate an income then. As I see it, if no advertising revenue, then income would have to come from either (a) subscription model (I don't think enough people would be willing to pay to cover the shortfall in advertising revenue), or (b) mining/analysis/sale of users' data on an obscene level (would enough people be prepared to sign up for that?).
Hmmm...looking at option (b)...yes, there probably are enough stupid/gullible people.
That's easy. There are many "data brokers" that pay good money for data sets. You don't need to run ads yourself (the Google model), you can just sell the data to data brokers that combine, filter and repackage that data to sell on to other companies.
If your data is part of three different data sets then a data broker can combine information about you into a new data set containing more or better info about you. That new data set will be worth more than a sum of its parts.
The admin of one of the world's largest Mastodon servers said that he noticed an increase in sign-ups since the Musk/Twitter announcement. Mastodon is essentially a decentralised version of Twitter.
The aggregated user count of most Mastodon instances (Gab and Trump's Truth.social are also using Mastodon but have chosen to be walled gardens so have disconnected themselves from the global Mastodon network) seems to support that statement.
Seems to me he wore out his welcome before he even started. Probably a bunch of those polls he's been running made the Twitter board think he was just a massive lawsuit waiting to happen.
Sherlock because he'll get to the bottom of the real reason behind the band breaking up before it even formed.
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