Musk unlikely to fade into background by not joining Twitter board
Twitter’s chief executive knows this will not be the end of it. Announcing that Elon Musk will not join the company’s board, Parag Agrawal wrote: “There will be distractions ahead.”
Interference is hard to avoid when one of your largest shareholders has more than 80 million followers on your platform and a penchant for impulsive use of the tweet button. Since it emerged last Monday that the world’s wealthiest person controls 9.2% of Twitter, Musk has lived up to his reputation for shoot-first-ask-later tweeting.
In a stream of posts, some of which have been deleted, Musk flagged a number of potential changes to the platform. As is often the case with the Tesla chief executive, it was hard to separate visionary business guidance from mischief.
Among the removed tweets was a suggestion that Twitter’s premium service should be made ad-free. This broached a commercially heretical path for a business that makes 90% of its annual revenue of $5bn (£3.8bn) from advertising. Musk’s justification for such a move was characteristically blunt: “The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive.”
As per Agrawal’s reference to distractions, just because Musk is no longer joining the Twitter board, it does not mean he will fade into the background. It is not Musk’s style, a point reinforced by his filings with the US financial watchdog related to the investment. He filed disclosure of his shareholding to the US Securities and Exchange Commission last Monday with a schedule 13G, which is for passive investors who are not preparing to shake up the business in question.
The next day he refiled it as a schedule 13D, for investors who intend to take an active role. As a board
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