How Elon Musk hijacked Twitter: from top troll to top management

Suddenly on the board of directors
From top troll to top management: How Elon Musk hijacked his favorite service, Twitter

04/06/2022 12:29 p.m

3 min reading time

If there’s one Twitter user who could take Donald Trump’s title of top troll, it’s Elon Musk. For years, the Tesla founder has been using the short message service to announce bizarre ideas, to spark discussions with ambiguous jokes or just to send the Bitcoin price up. But while Trump was fired last year, Musk is taking a different tack — and has now bought his way onto the company’s board of directors.

Twitter and Musk officially announced this surprising turn of events yesterday. Strictly speaking, inviting Musk to the company’s management is a limitation of power. Musk had become Twitter’s largest single shareholder by buying 9.2 percent of the company’s shares on Sunday. With the offer of a seat on the supervisory board, Twitter probably also wants to prevent a hostile takeover.

Musk wants to have a say

A vote he tweeted shortly after the announcement shows that Musk is also benefiting from this. There he asked his followers what they thought of a feature he had been asking for for a long time. “Do you want an edit button?” the tweet says simply. Twitter boss Parag Agrawal quickly made it clear that this was not a rhetorical question. “The outcome of this poll will be important. Please vote wisely,” he wrote in a retweet of the Musk Poll. In plain language: If enough users want the function, it should come. As requested by Musk.

The fact that the Tesla founder is striving to influence the short message service is basically not surprising. Musk had repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction with some of Twitter’s decisions in the past and recently even threatened to want to build a competitor if in doubt. Purchasing into the company should therefore also be associated with concrete ideas for change.

Troll on the board of directors

Freedom of expression is particularly important to Musk, as he repeatedly emphasized. He was a “free speech absolutist,” he announced a few weeks ago. Like other social networks, Twitter has been forced to take action in recent years due to the increase in false claims on important issues such as the Corona crisis, the US elections and, most recently, the war in Ukraine. Musk had criticized that loudly.

With Musk’s appointment to the supervisory board, however, Twitter is protecting itself against excessive influence by the major shareholder. And even explicitly. As long as Musk sits on the board and resigns 90 days after any, neither he alone nor a group to which he belongs may buy more than 14.9 percent of the company’s shares, Twitter said in a file entry with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is to prevent a hostile takeover. This had already been pointed out as an option by experts on Sunday. After all, Musk would not even have to invest ten percent of his current assets of $260 billion to buy half of the company, which is currently valued at around $40 billion.

The fact that Musk will still have considerable influence on Twitter is due to a special feature compared to the other tech giants. While at Amazon, Google or Facebook’s parent company Meta, the founders secured their influence with special shares that give them a majority of votes, the short message service has no such protective measure. For example, Mark Zuckerberg would have to sell his own specialty stocks to lose power over Meta. At Twitter it is enough to buy 50.1 percent of the shares to be able to decide on the fate of the company.

Musk probably plans to use his newly acquired influence. After CEO Parag Agrawal welcomed him to the board of directors via tweet, Musk replied that he was looking forward to working together. And the “significant improvements” he plans to make to the service over the coming months. What the former top troll means by that should be exciting.

Swell:Twitter file entry, Elon Musk