Elon Musk won't join Twitter's board
No explanation given for platform's biggest shareholder's decision
SAN FRANCISCO >> Billionaire Elon Musk, one of Twitter's biggest shareholders, is reversing course and will no longer join the company's board of directors, less than a week after being awarded a seat.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced the news, which followed a weekend of Musk tweets suggesting changes to Twitter, including making the site ad-free. Nearly 90% of Twitter's 2021 revenue came from ads.
“Elon's appointment to the board was to become officially effective on 4/9, but Elon shared that same morning that he would not be joining the board,” Agrawal wrote in a reposted note originally sent to Twitter employees. “I believe this is for the best.”
Agrawal didn't offer an explanation for Musk's apparent decision. He said the board understood the risks of having Musk, who is now the company's largest individual
Now that Elon Musk won't be joining Twitter's board of directors as previously announced, he's free to build a bigger stake in the company.
shareholder, as a member. But at the time it “believed 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,” he wrote.
It was just a week earlier that regulatory filings revealed Musk had swiftly amassed a slightly bigger than 9% stake in the social media platform. The mercurial billionaire had been buying shares in almost
daily batches starting Jan. 31. Only Vanguard Group's suite of mutual funds and ETFs controls more Twitter shares.
Twitter quickly gave Musk a seat on the board on the condition that he not own more than 14.9% of the company's outstanding stock, according to a regulatory filing.
Now that Musk has backed out of the deal, he's free to build a bigger stake in Twitter, perhaps to try to