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Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

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Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#521

Post by pbreit »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #389
Ericson2314 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fate of the company after it has been taken private doesn't matter as far as "fiduciary duty" is concerned.

> fate of the company after it has been taken private doesn't matter as far as "fiduciary duty" is concerned If it goes private. As always, Matt Levine says it better than I can: "...the financing seems to be made up of cobwebs and phlogiston. But also Musk has joked about taking companies private before, and he generally changes his mind a lot. (He agreed to join Twitter’s board last week! And then changed his mind…

Levine is being disingenuous, as usual. Obviously he would have banks and investors fighting to finance the deal. Wouldn't a breakup penalty address the breakup problem?

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#522

Post by tag2103 »

tehwebguy wrote: post #490
alfor wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He will sell his 9% He will start something to compete against Twitter. Twitter will be stuck with their current management and cultural problems.

Nobody will switch from Twitter to some knock off he or anyone else makes. (By “nobody” I mean both nearly 0% of users and only people who will not be missed on Twitter)

I hate to disagree with you but when was the last time you checked your MySpace page?

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#523

Post by paulpauper »

hankchinaski wrote: post #495
paulpauper wrote: post #427

If elon owns twitter privately he can just go through his comments and ban the impersonators on the spot. He has complained for years about twitter not doing enough to stop scam impersonators. In fact he can ban anyone then. He would literally have that power. Conversely, he could also unban anyone. There would be no chain of command. Imagine using fakebook but then also having the power to ban anyone too. I think he…

you lost me at Obama DMs

i don't understand. I am sure twitter has confidentiality procedures. under new ownership this would change.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#524

Post by quickthrowman »

rosndo wrote: post #424
roughly wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An ETF isn’t going to “accidentally” exceed 15% ownership of Twitter. No, but an ETF has a defined investment strategy, and if enough money comes into the ETF, it could potentially trigger this.

Do you think big ETFs just buy shares willy nilly without any due diligence on company charters and bylaws?

If it’s a passively managed index fund, then yes, absolutely.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#525

Post by vimy »

hooande wrote: post #485
toephu2 wrote: post #457

Wow, my prediction is Musk will walk away, Twitter stock price will tank, and Twitter will be flooded with thousands of shareholder lawsuits (for breaching their fiduciary duty).

As is detailed by many smart people below, fiduciary duty lawsuits are difficult to win. They'd pretty much have to have board members emailing each other saying "This would be in the best interest of shareholders, but let's screw them over instead" This was an epic debacle. Musk invested 4 BILLION dollars in an asset of questionable value, because "free speech". If he times it right he could come out ahead financial…

These are just the opening moves. It isn’t over yet.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#526

Post by anonu »

hedora wrote: post #161
nickysielicki wrote: post #29

I don’t understand how any board can implement a “poison pill”, not just Twitter but Netflix and others, and not be found working against the interest of shareholders. Can anyone help me understand? You’re categorically changing the profile of the stock. This has a chilling effect on large investors, including but not limited just to Musk, right? Vanguard, for example, has just had its range of further investment lim…

Wait, if some ETF accidentally exceeds 15%, then what? First of all, that'll screw over a bunch of small investors, right? Second, could Elon swoop in at that point? Edit: Also, if Elon is reading this, I'll happily buy 14.9% of twitter, and vote as part of your block. Just pay me enough to cover the sale and taxes, plus 1%.

This happened with SKT (Tanger outlets) which is a high dividend paying stock in SDY ETF. The ETF was approaching 50% ownership stake.

The fund needs to report their holdings. Not all companies have a poison pill provision. Not all companies that do have a poison pill will activate it. In the case of an ETF there's usually a discussion between the portfolio manager and the company. They know where they stand. Plus it's not really in a passive fund mandate to go activist.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#527

Post by PKop »

tyre wrote: post #139
_3u10 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I made 10% getting in after the disclosure was made. I’d actually invest in a twitter owned by Elon and likely ditch all my other profiles too. A platform that makes money and has free speech would be wonderful. Maybe he can steal Rogan from Spotify too.

What’s a concrete example of speech that you’d make which is specifically banned on Twitter?

Recently there have been many accounts getting banned for being critical of US foreign policy in Ukraine conflict, disagreeing with western media propaganda around specific events. Also many got banned for posting "conspiracy theories" around COVID that eventually became conventional wisdom like its origin in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

If one disagrees with liberal establishment rhetoric on gender issues, you also get banned very quickly. There are a bunch of these consensus political issues that are off limits for debate.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#528

Post by pbreit »

tayo42 wrote: post #459
systemvoltage wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can equally argue that opens sourcing Twitter algorithm and building trust would bring incalculable number of new users, have a profound impact on their ad business and not to mention, cut down their competitor's moat. People will flock to Twitter like bees. Ad revenue + subscription would skyrocket. So, it can go either way and can be argued either way.

> opens sourcing Twitter algorithm People need to stop saying this. It's nonsense. Or maybe keep saying it so we know your clueless about how anything works that your commenting on

Please explain. I can easily envision much more transparency on how the feed works.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#529

Post by bandyaboot »

systemvoltage wrote: post #373
woodruffw wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was a member of Twitter's board, Musk's history of erratic public behavior, SEC settlement, and openly hostile attitude towards the company's employees would be more than sufficient to justify my belief that his controlling ownership would not be in the interest of the current average shareholder. That opinion would also be consistent with how "fiduciary duty" is interpreted by US regulators: companies are not r…

One can equally argue that opens sourcing Twitter algorithm and building trust would bring incalculable number of new users, have a profound impact on their ad business and not to mention, cut down their competitor's moat. People will flock to Twitter like bees. Ad revenue + subscription would skyrocket. So, it can go either way and can be argued either way.

I think you’re vastly overestimating the number of people who pay attention to such things.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#530

Post by aahan5 »

wwweston wrote: post #413
scythe wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Icahn was claiming that Netflix was undervalued. To be fair, he was also angling for an acquisition. But a bid like that usually has a half-life; the market trends to a good price — and indeed, Netflix doubled in value by mid-2013. Elon is arguing that Twitter is mismanaged. He already probably pushed them on the edit button, even though they claimed he didn't. If he's right — and Goldman Sachs seems to agree — he co…

> Elon is arguing that Twitter is mismanaged. Anyone who thinks this is manifestly true should read this take from an ex-CEO of Reddit: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 tl;dr: managing human interaction in any environment with limited accountability is a lot harder than it looks Also, there's the question of by what metrics one would argue it's mismanaged. Revenue and engagement trends? Profitabi…

That's only from a content moderation point of view. I would argue Twitter is incredibly mismanaged from a product POV. Barely any new features, buff Android app (at least for me), and Twitter Blue being pretty useless.
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