Elon Musk, no longer Twitter’s largest shareholder, demonstrates how little he gets about content moderation
The Wall Street Journal reports:
While Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter Inc., he’s no longer the company’s largest shareholder.
Funds held by Vanguard Group recently upped their stake in the social-media platform, making the asset manager Twitter’s largest shareholder and bumping Mr. Musk out of the top spot.
Vanguard disclosed on April 8 that it now owns 82.4 million shares of Twitter, or 10.3% of the company, according to the most recent publicly available filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The asset-manager increased its stake in the company at some point during the first quarter, according to the filings. Vanguard’s holdings are now worth $3.78 billion, based on Twitter stock’s closing price on Wednesday.
That’s enough to knock Mr. Musk off the perch as Twitter’s largest shareholder, according to FactSet.
Vanguard isn’t making a directional bet on Twitter. Instead, the majority of its assets are in index and other so-called passive funds. The firm often sides with management on voting issues and doesn’t advocate for changes like a hedge fund or activist investor might. [Continue reading…]
Lots of talk yesterday as Elon Musk made a hostile takeover bid for all of Twitter. This was always a possibility, and one that we discussed before in looking at how little Musk seemed to understand about free speech. But soon after the bid was made public, Musk went on stage at TED to be interviewed by Chris Anderson and spoke more about his thoughts on Twitter and content moderation.
It’s worth watching, though mostly for how it shows how very, very little Musk understands about all of this. Indeed, what struck me about his views is how much they sound like what the techies who originally created social media said in the early days. And here’s the important bit: all of them eventually learned that their simplistic belief in how things should work does not work in reality and have spent the past few decades trying to iterate. And Musk ignores all of that while (somewhat hilariously) suggesting that all of those things can be figured out eventually, despite all of the hard work many, many overworked and underpaid people have been doing figuring exactly that out, only to be told by Musk he’s sure they’re doing it wrong. [Continue reading…]
Twitter adopted a limited duration shareholder rights plan, often called a “poison pill,” a day after billionaire Elon Musk offered to buy the company for $43 billion, the company announced Friday.
The board voted unanimously to adopt the plan.
Under the new structure, if any person or group acquires beneficial ownership of at least 15% of Twitter’s outstanding common stock without the board’s approval, other shareholders will be allowed to purchase additional shares at a discount.
The plan is set to expire on April 14, 2023. [Continue reading…]