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Elon Musk tried to buy Twitter. He attempted to rescind that attempt, but was eventually forced to close the deal.

A new study, however, sheds new light on the acquisition’s impact on Twitter employees and how Twitter’s key executives and board abandoned the social media platform’s mission statement and core values.

According to the study How Twitter Put Stakeholders under The Bus (titled How Twitter Pushed them Under the Bus),:

“When negotiating the deal, Twitter’s corporate leaders chose to focus exclusively on the interests of their shareholders and the private interests of corporate leaders themselves. Despite their stakeholder rhetoric over the years, Twitter’s corporate leaders essentially chose to push their stakeholders under the (Musk) bus.”

Is This How Much did Twitter Insiders Earn on the Deal?

With Musk’s offer to acquire Twitter at a 38% stock price premium, it’s not surprising that Twitter’s top four executives made a lot of money on the deal.

Stock price premium perspectives, the top four executives earned $74.3million from the shares that they owned. Gains weren’t limited to the price premium. Restricted and performance stock units (RSUs and PSUs) added $138 million to the executive team’s payday.

8 non-executive directors made it to the top, with $68M in share price appreciation, $20M from stock options and $5M in RSUs/PSUs.

Twitter Boardroom: Hypocrisy

What did the executive team and board do to protect Twitter employees’ interests? It wasn’t much. The study found:

“Given that any acquisition might be followed by layoffs, and that this risk was clear and present in the case of the Twitter acquisition, it might be expected that employee-oriented corporate leaders would seek to use some part of the surplus created by the deal to cushion employees who stood to lose their employment.”

This is a poor expectation.

The agreement placed no limitations regarding the scale and speed with which Musk could fire his new “tweeps” (the company’s term for its employees). The study found that the deal did not offer any compensation for layoff workers or monetary benefits. In fact, Twitter was prohibited from making such promises to employees between the closing and signing of the deal.

The study’s authors pointed out:

“Employee-oriented corporate leaders could have declined to tie their hands from amending the terms of employee contracts. Given the small size of this monetary commitment relative to the deal premium or acquisition price, retaining the board’s power to make such promises to employees should have been expected not to preclude the deal but at most require a minor adjustment in other deal terms.”

Reuters reported that, in April 2022, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal reassured employees there were no plans for layoffs, …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer

Author: Aaron