Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey addresses students at a city hall at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India, on November 12, 2018.
Anushree Fadnavis | Reuters
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey criticized the company’s board of directors in a series of tweets on Sunday, as the group is now tasked with evaluating a takeover bid by billionaire Elon Musk.
In response to another Twitter user describing the “conspiracies and coups” that played out early in the history of Twitter CEO Dorsey answered“It was consistently the dysfunction of the business.”
He had previously replied to another tweet in the same thread. It quoted venture capitalist Fred Destin, who quoted a “Silicon Valley proverb”: “Good boards don’t make good companies, but a bad board will kill a company every time.”
Dorsey replied: “Big facts”.
Dorsey still sits on Twitter’s board of directors but plans to leave after his term expires at the 2022 shareholders’ meeting scheduled for late May.
The board is currently reviewing Tesla CEO Musk’s $43 billion offer to buy and privatize the company. It’s also reportedly sparking additional interest. On Friday, Twitter’s board of directors passed what it called a poison pill — a limited-term shareholder rights plan that would allow shareholders to buy shares at a discount if an individual or entity accumulates at least 15% of its outstanding common stock without prior board approval. Musk recently announced a more than 9% stake in the company ahead of his takeover bid.
The board said the plan would not prevent it from completing a deal in the best interests of the company and its shareholders, but it would “reduce the likelihood that a company, person or group would seize control of Twitter through accumulation on the open.” market without paying all shareholders a reasonable control premium or without giving the board sufficient time to make informed judgments and take actions that are in the best interests of shareholders.”
Dorsey, who was also a co-founder of the company, was formerly CEO but was fired from that position in 2008 and replaced by another of his co-founders. In 2015 he returned to run the company.
Musk tweeted Saturday that after Dorsey left the board, “collectively, the Twitter board owns almost no stock! Objectively, their economic interests are simply not aligned with shareholders.”
Dorsey noticed recently that he “ended up having very little of the company” because many of his shares were stripped from him when he was fired in 2008. He said he also gave back 1% of the company to employees in 2015. Still, Dorsey remains the company’s largest insider stakeholder after Musk’s 9.1% stake, with about 2.25% of the shares, according to FactSet. After that, Silver Lake, whose CEO Egon Durban is a Twitter board member, owns 0.26%, according to FactSet. According to FactSet, Vanguard Group is the largest institutional shareholder with a 10.29% stake.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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