Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and Twitter’s largest individual shareholder, has declined to join the social media company’s board of directors.
Parag Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter, announced the news on Twitter late Sunday night.
“Elon’s appointment to the board was set to take effect on 4/9, but Elon announced that same morning that he would no longer be joining the board,” Agrawal said in the tweet. “This, I suppose, is for the best. Whether or whether our stockholders are on our Board, we have always valued their opinion. Elon is our largest shareholder, and we will continue to listen to his suggestions.”
Musk’s decision not to join the Twitter board of directors was confirmed by a Twitter representative, who pointed to Agrawal’s statement.
The news comes less than a week after Musk said that he had bought a more than 9% investment in the firm, and Twitter (TWTR) announced that Musk will be appointed to its board of directors for a period ending in 2024 in a regulatory filing. Musk and Twitter’s leadership have both expressed enthusiasm for his appointment to the board.
“Looking forward to working with Parag & the Twitter board to bring big changes to Twitter in the coming months!” Musk tweeted on Tuesday. Musk and Agrawal would make a “amazing team,” according to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. After his initial purchase was made public, Twitter’s shares soared.
Musk agreed not to buy more than 14.9 percent of the company’s stock during his tenure on the board as part of his agreement to join it. Some corporate governance experts speculated that the decision was made to limit Musk’s control over the corporation. That restriction is no longer in effect, allowing Musk to possibly take a more aggressive posture by purchasing more of Twitter’s stock.
Agrawal said the company’s board “believed that having Elon as a fiduciary of the firm, where he, like other board members, has to act in the best interests of the company and all our shareholders, was the best road ahead” in a tweet late Sunday night revealing Musk’s reversal.
Corporate board members are also known to express their ideas for the firm in private, which might have forced Musk to cease tweeting about his plans for Twitter. Musk’s decision to leave the board came after a series of tweets about the company over the weekend, including one in which he suggested removing the “w” from “Twitter” — an apparent crude joke that has since been deleted — and another in which he wondered if Twitter was “dying” because some of its most-followed accounts don’t tweet very often.
It’s unclear what adjustments Musk was looking for — or still is looking for — in Twitter. Musk has remarked on Twitter that the network does not allow enough free expression and that it should open source its algorithm. Last Monday, he asked his followers whether they “want an edit button,” a long-standing, albeit polarising, feature request from many Twitter users. (Twitter said last week that it had been developing an edit function for the past year.)
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