According to two people familiar with the company’s plans, who were not authorized to speak publicly, Twitter was expected to unveil its counterattack on Friday as soon as possible against Elon Musk, who was given a poison pill. known as.
The strategy will aim to slow or block Mr Musk’s $43 billion bid to buy Twitter.
A poison pill devised by law firms in the 1980s to protect companies from corporate attackers is essentially a takeover target by flooding the market with new shares or allowing existing shareholders to buy them at a discount. . This means that anyone trying to acquire the company would have to buy many more shares to gain control.
The details of how Twitter’s poison pill would be designed were not known.
On Thursday, Mr Musk announced his intention to acquire the social media service, a purchase he believed would allow him to roll back Twitter’s moderation policies.
Twitter has attempted to overtake the world’s richest person in recent weeks as it steadily slashed its shares. Last week, Twitter offered Mr Musk a board seat, but when it became clear he would no longer be able to freely criticize the company, he turned the arrangement sour. He rejected the role on Saturday and informed Twitter of his acquisition plans on Wednesday evening.
Mr Musk appeared to be gearing up for a long fight on Thursday. “Taking Twitter private at $54.20 should be for the shareholders, not the board,” he tweeted alongside a yes/no poll.
Still, it’s not clear who, if anyone, will be on Mr Musk’s side. Their initial, bare-bones offering left important questions about their ability to end the financing together. Mr Musk has hired Morgan Stanley to advise on the bid, although the investment bank is not generally known for financing large-scale deals on its own. And Twitter shareholders seemed wary: Twitter stock fell nearly 2 percent on Thursday, closing at $45.08 — far below what Mr.
Saudi Arabia’s Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, who describes himself as one of Twitter’s largest and longest-term shareholders, said on Thursday that Twitter should reject Mr. Of “intrinsic valueAnalysts also suggested that Mr Musk was undervalued and did not reflect Twitter’s recent performance.
Mr Musk argued that taking Twitter private would allow more free speech to flow across the platform. “My strong instinctive feeling is that having a public forum that is maximally credible and comprehensively inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” he said in an interview at the TED conference on Thursday.
He also stressed that the algorithms Twitter uses to rank its content, deciding what hundreds of millions of users watch on the service every day, must be public for users to audit.
Mr Musk’s concerns are shared by several executives on Twitter, who have also pressed for more transparency about its algorithms. The company is published. internal research About bias in its algorithms and funded an effort to create an open, transparent standard for social media services.
But Twitter executives balked at Mr Musk’s hardball strategy. After a board meeting on Thursday morning, the company began exploring options to block Mr Musk, including using a poison pill and the possibility of attracting another buyer.
During a consensus meeting on Thursday afternoon, Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agarwal, sought to reassure employees about a possible shake-up. Although he declined to share details about the board’s plans, he encouraged employees to stay focused and not let themselves be distracted by Mr. Musk.
