Amid a feared takeover bid from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Twitter’s board of directors threatened to fight back with a “poison pill” strategy, allowing it to flood the market with new shares if Musk buys more than 15 percent of the company.
Fending off Musk’s $43 billion offer by creating more shares could dilute the value of shareholders’ stock — but Twitter’s 10 board members own just a tiny portion, Musk noted in an April 16 tweet: “The Twitter board collectively owns almost no shares! Objectively, their economic interests are simply not aligned with shareholders.”
The article goes on to state the following:
That same day, even Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who is formally leaving the board when his term expires at the company’s annual shareholder meeting next month, tweeted that the board of directors “has consistently been the dysfunction of the company.”
Here is a list of each of the board members:
- Bret Taylor, chairman of Twitter’s independent board, a former product manager at Google who co-created Google Maps.
- Parang Agrawal, CEO, Twitter, joined Twitter in 2011, he took over the leadership of the company in 2021.
- Mimi Alemayehou, senior vice president for public-private partnership at Mastercard. From NY Post: “Born in Ethiopia, Alemayehou spent her childhood in Kenya and has a master’s degree in international affairs from Tufts University. In 2010, President Barack Obama nominated her as the executive vice president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation…”
- Fei-Fei Li, professor of computer science at Stanford University, has been vice president at Google and chief scientist at Google Cloud, and is co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
- Egon Pierre Durban, co-CEO of Silver Lake, a billion-dollar private investment firm that specializes in technology investments.
- Robert Zoellick, former president of the World Bank, former deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush.
- Patrick Pichette, former chief financial officer of Google, Twitter board member since December 2017, London-based partner at Inovia Capital, a Canadian venture capital firm.
- Martha Lane Fox, entrepreneur and philanthropist, a baroness who has been on the Twitter board since April 2016 and also served as the founder and chair of Lucky Voice Group Ltd., a private karaoke company.
- Omid Kordestani, entrepreneur and former executive chairman of Twitter, Iranian-born, worth $1.9 billion, has been on the Twitter board since October 2015.
- David Rosenblatt, CEO of 1stdibs.com,has been on the Twitter board since January 2011, began his career in e-commerce in 1997 as a product manager at Doubleclick, a business that makes its money from online advertisers.
These are the Twitter board members fighting Elon Musk’s takeover bid https://t.co/4WoRddSAFu pic.twitter.com/scFBlsecey
— New York Post (@nypost) April 21, 2022
Read more about the board at NY Post.
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