Elon Musk's new bid for Twitter includes $0 salary for board members
India Today
"Board salary will be $0 if my bid succeeds, so that's ~$3M/year (roughly Rs. 22 crore) saved right there," Musk tweeted while replying to a user's post criticising the Twitter board.
Elon Musk’s aspirations for Twitter are not going down well with the company’s board members. After his offer for a takeover through a $43 billion buyout was blocked by the board through the poison pill strategy, Musk has launched fresh attacks on board members by suggesting that if his bid for the takeover gets through, he would bring down the board salary to $0 — a move that Musk said would save the company $3 million (roughly Rs 22 crore) a year.
"Board salary will be $0 if my bid succeeds, so that's ~$3M/year (roughly Rs. 22 crore) saved right there," Musk tweeted while replying to a user's post criticising the Twitter board.
Musk did not say anything beyond his proposal to do away with board salary, but this might as well be a jibe at the Twitter board, which is fighting the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive from taking over the microblogging website. Just before this response, Musk asked his 80 million followers on Twitter if “taking Twitter private at $54.20 (roughly Rs 4,150) should be up to shareholders, not the board.” The majority of people voted yes to his poll, assuring Musk that he may be right in his endeavours.
According to Musk, Twitter should be a platform “for free speech around the globe.” “...I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment, I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company," Musk had said in the SEC filings.
Musk may have a great vision, especially if you factor in the fact that he is willing to splurge a whopping $43 billion for a microblogging website, but he is apparently losing hope that his takeover bid will succeed now that he is no longer the top shareholder of the company. Soon after Musk revealed he owned a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter, the board resorted to finding ways to demote Musk. One of the asset managers for Twitter, Vanguard Group, later revealed it had upped its stake in the company to outmatch Musk’s. Then the company adopted the poison pill strategy in which the company’s freshly issued shares are sold to existing shareholders at discounted prices to make any buyout plan extremely costly and, in a way, prohibitive, for hostile takeovers.
