The developments at Twitter have been widely reported over the past few days with Elon Musk recently elected as a board member of Twitter only days after it became clear from a regulatory filing that he had acquired 9.2% of the stock as a ‘passive investor’. I find the ‘passive investor’ title curious as acquiring a large number of shares, running various polls on the future path of Twitter and its features, and being elected to the board do not seem awfully passive in nature.
Regardless, the SEC defines a passive investor as someone who has “not acquired the securities with any purpose, or with the effect, of changing or influencing the control of the issuer.”. Make of that what you will but running public polls on how Twitter should run its business sounds a lot like shareholder activism which by its very definition is not ‘passive’.
Musk has a history of incidents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (recall his infamous ‘funding secured’ tweet on taking Tesla private at $420 a share) and this may be another straw on the proverbial camel’s back as the SEC requires that anyone who acquires more than 5% of a company’s stock disclose this holding within 10 days – Musk filed his after 21 days. This is not something that the SEC generally takes lightly and it will be interesting to see what transpires, but the fine is generally in the region of $100,000 which shouldn’t worry Musk in the slightest considering the stock he just bought in Twitter is valued at roughly $2.89 billion.
Aside from all the boring regulatory technicalities I do think it would be immensely interesting to be a fly on the wall in those board meetings – especially considering that Musk has tweeted several meme’s comparing the current Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal to Joseph Stalin.
Jokes aside, I do think Elon has potentially valuable contributions to make to Twitter, aside from the near 30% increase in the stock price caused simply by his involvement with the company. As the current CEO recently tweeted Musk is “both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need”. Only time will tell how ‘passive’ Elon’s involvement turns out to be.
Forget all of that though, what the people really want to know is if Elon will let Trump back on Twitter to keep us all entertained!