Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey served the company on a platter to Elon Musk by “backstabbing” the company’s board of directors, one of the social-media giant’s co-founders alleged.
Former board member Jason Goldman, who was part of Twitter’s founding team more than a decade ago, told Bloomberg News that he believes Dorsey encouraged Musk to buy the company outright when Musk initially only negotiated joining the board.
Goldman, who was Twitter’s vice president of product, told Bloomberg that the company’s president, Brett Taylor, and CEO Parag Agarwal struck a deal with Musk to bring him on as a director in exchange for agreeing to buy more shares. Can go
An SEC filing submitted a few days later showed that Musk owned a 9.2% stake in Twitter — the equivalent of 73.4 million shares at the time, the most of any shareholder.
According to an SEC filing, Musk asked Twitter’s board to convene a meeting, during which Dorsey “shared his personal view that Twitter as a private company would be able to better focus on execution.”
Goldman said Dorsey’s comments showed he was the one who urged Musk to take over the company completely and take it private.
“To me it’s like the founder stabbing the board in the back when they had the deal come to a standstill,” Goldman said.
Goldman told Bloomberg that Twitter shareholders want Musk to comply with the terms of the $54.20-a-share tender offer. Musk tweeted that the deal was “on hold” due to alleged concerns about the proliferation of “spam” and “bot” accounts.
Twitter has stated its intention to implement the agreement, despite Musk’s misgivings. Analysts believe Musk is just looking for a way to renegotiate the buy price, especially after Twitter stock’s plunge in recent weeks.
“The most important answer [the company] It could insist that there is no such thing as a halt to the deal,” Goldman said.
Goldman made the comments a day before Twitter, whose board accepted the Tesla CEO’s buyout offer at $54.20 a share, held its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday.
A short time later, Musk withdrew from the deal and announced that he was making a $44 billion hostile takeover.
Dorsey has backed Musk’s acquisition, saying he agrees with the Tesla boss’s vision of enabling greater freedom of expression on the site.
Musk on Wednesday pledged an additional $6.25 billion in equity financing for a $44 billion offer to Twitter, zeroing out the billionaire’s margin debt against his Tesla shares.
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