Twitter’s Board Gave Up
Also iron mining, Bitcoin mining and not granite mining.
You can tell a simple story about Elon Musk’s pending acquisition of Twitter Inc. that goes like this. Musk offered Twitter $54.20 per share in cash. Twitter’s board of directors consulted some bankers, who told them that the market price of Twitter’s stock was lower than $54.20, and that it would likely stay lower in the near future, due to Twitter not making all that much money. The board of directors had a fiduciary duty to maximize the stock price for those shareholders. They looked for higher bids than $54.20, but none materialized. So they had no choice but to take Musk’s $54.20.
This simple story is the one that, for instance, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal told Twitter employees last week.1 Casey Newton reports on a Twitter all-hands call Friday: