King 👑 Dorsey Has Fallen off of His Pedestal, in His Efforts to Destroy Conservative Views/Christian Voices He’s Destroyed His Own Creation

HNewsWire: Twitter’s board of directors gathered this week to sign what sounds like a suicide pact. It unanimously voted to swallow a “poison pill” to tank the value of the social media giant’s shares rather than allow billionaire Elon Musk to buy the company.

The move is one way to fend off hostile takeovers, but what is different in this case is the added source of the hostility: Twitter and many liberals are apoplectic over Musk’s call for free speech protections on the site. 

Company boards have a fiduciary duty to do what is best for shareholders, which usually is measured in share values. Twitter has long done the opposite. It has virtually written off many conservatives — and a large portion of its prospective market — with years of arbitrary censorship of dissenting views on everything from gender identity to global warming, election fraud and the pandemic. Most recently, Twitter suspended a group, Libs of Tik Tok, for “hateful conduct.” The conduct? Reposting what liberals have said about themselves.

The company seemingly has written off free speech too. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded dismissively that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”

Not surprisingly, selling censorship is not a big hit with most consumers, particularly from a communications or social media company. The actions of Twitter’s management have led to roller-coastering share values. While Twitter once reached a high of about $73 a share, it is currently around $45. (Musk was offering $54.20 a share, representing a 54 percent premium over the share price the day before he invested in the company.)

Notably, Musk will not trigger the poison pill if he stays below 15 percent ownership of the company. He could push his present stake up to 14.9 percent and then negotiate with other shareholders to take greater control.

Another problem is that Twitter long sought a private buyer under former CEO Jack Dorsey. If Musk increases his bid closer to $60, the board could face liability in putting its interests ahead of the company’s shareholders.

Putting aside the magical share number, Musk is right that the company’s potential has been constrained by its woke management. For social media companies, free speech is not only ethically but economically beneficial — because the censorship model only works if you have an effective monopoly in which customers have no other choice. That is how Henry Ford could tell customers, back when he controlled car-making, that they could have any color of Model T “as long as it’s black.”

Of course, the Model T’s color was not a critical part of the product. On the other hand, Twitter is a communications company selling censorship — and opposing free speech as a social media company is a little like Ford opposing cars.

The public could be moving beyond Twitter’s Model T philosophy, however, with many people looking for access to an open, free forum for discussions.

Censorship - or “content modification,” as used in polite company - is not value maximizing for Twitter, but it is status enhancing for executives such as Agrawal.

It does not matter that consumers of his product want less censorship; the company has become captive to its executives’ agendas.

Twitter is not alone in pursuing such self-defeating values. Many in the mainstream media and many on the left have become some of the loudest advocates for corporate censorship.

The Washington Post’s Max Boot, for example, declared, “For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”

MSNBC’s Katy Tur warned that reintroducing free speech values on Twitter could produce “massive, life- and globe-altering consequences for just letting people run wild on the thing.” 

Columnist and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich went full Orwellian in explaining why freedom is tyranny. Reich dismissed calls for free speech and warned that censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”

He then delivered a line that would make Big Brother blush:

“That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.”

The problem comes when you sell fear for too long and at too high a price.

Recently, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) agreed with MSNBC analyst John Heilemann that Democrats have to “scare the crap out of [voters] and get them to come out.”

That line is not selling any better for the media than it is for social media, however. Trust in the media is at a record low, with only 7 percent expressing great trust in what is being reported. The United States ranks last in media trust among 46 nations. 

Just as the public does not want social media companies to control their views, it does not want the media to shape its news. In one recent poll, “76.3% of respondents from all political affiliations said that ‘the primary focus of the mainstream media’s coverage of current events is to advance their own opinions or political agendas.'”

Thus, an outbreak of free speech could have dire consequences for many in the political-corporate-media triumvirate. For them, the greatest danger is that Musk could be right and Twitter would become a more popular, more profitable company selling a free speech product. 

Poison pill maneuvers are often used to force a potential buyer to negotiate with the board. However, Twitter’s directors (who include Agrawal and Dorsey) have previously limited their product to advance their own political preferences. This time, federal law may force them to fulfill their fiduciary duties, even at the cost of supporting free speech. The problem for the board will occur when the “nightmare” of free speech comes in at $60 a share.

Twitter Inc.'s board of directors is not acting in the best interest of the company's stockholders, according to Elon Musk on Saturday.

Twitter's board of directors now holds almost no shares after Jack's departure. He responded to a tweet providing a chart of the ownership percentages of Twitter board members by noting that "objectively, their economic interests are just not aligned with shareholders."

Most board members possess less than 0.005 percent of the company's stock, according to the graph.

According to Twitter's most recent SEC filing, the company's 14 executive officers and directors control 2.7 percent of the company's stock. The CEO-turned-board-chair, Jack Dorsey, owns 2.4 percent of the 2.7%, with the rest of the shareholders owning just 0.3 percent.

On September 5, 2018, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter Inc., testified before the Intelligence Committee in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on the use of social media platforms by foreign influence operations.

Twitter's co-founder, former CEO, and current board chair, Jack Dorsey, got into the debate and said that when he joined the board in 2008, the board was structured to prevent board member ownership.

After being sacked in 2008, the board of directors seized most of my shares from me when I was promoted to chair." In addition, in 2015, I returned 1% of the company's equity to the company's workforce. He answered, "So I ended up with very little company," he said.

In November 2021, Dorsey announced his resignation as CEO of Twitter and his departure from the board at the 2022 meeting of shareholders, both of which will take place when his current term ends.

An anti-Musk clause regarded as a "poison pill" by the financial community was accepted by Twitter's board of directors on Friday after Musk declared his intention to purchase Twitter for $43 billion.

Twitter investors will be allowed to purchase more shares at a cheaper price if any business, person, or group acquires 15% or more of Twitter's stock through a transaction that has not been authorized by the board.

In preparation for his contentious takeover attempt of the large tech giant, Tesla CEO Elon Musk seems to be gathering more powder.

In another Twitter debate, he noted that when a Twitter user branded Twitter's poison pill as "criminal negligence," it may be "more of a worry about other possible bidders" than of simply him.

Source: ZeroHedge