Twitter board gets an ‘F’ for dealing with Elon Musk: former SEC chairman

Twitter’s board (TWTR) is doing a terrible job handling the Elon Musk situation, said former SEC chairman Harvey Pitt.

“I would give Twitter’s board an F,” Pitt said on Yahoo Finance Live. “I believe under the circumstances, they needed to check out whether this was a real bid. If it were a real bid, then they needed to do what was in the best interest of their shareholders. This is a price that hadn’t been seen in quite some time. The number is at least a legitimate frame of reference and the board’s unwillingness to treat it seriously strikes me as worthy of a poor grade.”

The Tesla CEO, who has a 9.2% stake in Twitter, offered to buy the social media platform for $54.20 a share last week. Musk believes the platform should be less reliant on advertising sales and better police its content, among other initial ideas from the unpredictable visionary.

As to be expected, Twitter is hardly embracing Musk’s arrival.

Soon after Musk’s bid, Twitter said it along with its board of directors “will carefully review the proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interest of the Company and all Twitter stockholders.”

Twitter has since enacted a poison pill to keep Musk from acquiring more of the company.

“We believe the latest development, if anything, is a major distraction for Twitter’s management team and further casts doubt on Twitter’s ability to achieve its aggressive FY23 mDAU and Revenue guidance (315 million mDAUs in Q4’23 and $7.5 billion plus in revenue for full year 2023), which we are fundamentally cautious about,” warned Deutsche Bank analyst Benjamin Black.

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

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