ETwitter is in a very similar position for most of the 20th century. A company is in a difficult situation and must consider selling. Twitter was open to receiving offers from Yahoo and Facebook during the 2000s. A few years later came a Google outreach and in 2016, a Disney offer. Facebook’s $500 million proposition probably It stands out most because it is the most thoughtful of all the companies, and arrived at the same time as Jack Dorsey, the CEO, had just left (sound familiar? Questions arose about the possibility that the company would live up its economic potential.

“All of the acquisition events for Twitter have always been around other board drama or changes in CEO leadership, like, you know, the one that’s happening now,” recalls Jason Goldman, a founding executive at Twitter. He spent almost a decade on Twitter’s board and was there for the Yahoo, Facebook and Google bids. “Twitter has the kind of cultural resonance that much larger companies wish they had, a bigger cultural footprint than the size of the business suggests,” Goldman says.

Today, Twitter’s back in trouble, and maybe it’s time to add another would-be suitor to the list, like say, Microsoft or SalesForce. Let me explain: Twitter right now has an untested new CEO, Parag Agrawal, trying to make the business grow—to mend that gap between commercial potential and cultural significance. He’s contending with the advances of the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. Musk is willing to buy Twitter for $54.20/share, which represents a slight premium over what the stock traded in recent trading, and a valuation of $43 Billion. (It is delivered in classic Musk fashion: “420” at the end of his share-price figure is a deliberate reference to April 20, a day marijuana enthusiasts view as a holiday.) In making his overture, Musk expressed skepticism about the company’s current management. He said he wanted Twitter to be “the platform for free speech around the globe” and added: “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.”

Although Twitter may not be keen to offer the deal to Musk, it might soon run out of options to defend him. And if Musk doesn’t complete the deal, he may have unintentionally opened the door for other acquisitive parties to wander in and launch their own bids.

Twitter doesn’t have the protection offered by the dual-share classes that Meta, Snap and Alphabet have, which prevent raiders showing up on a corporate doorstep. Twitter could adopt a poison pill strategy, selling stock at a discount to dilute Musk’s stake. In doing so, Agrawal might walk away with control of Twitter, but it’s unclear how much of Twitter …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer

Author: Aaron