Weekly Briefing — Issue 118

According to people familiar with the situation, Twitter has hired a second investment bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, to assist it in responding to Elon Musk’s hostile takeover bid. The U.S. bank recently began working with Twitter to assist it in conversations with potential purchasers.

Aside from Musk’s offer, Twitter has received takeover interest from a number of other companies, including Thoma Bravo, a technology-focused private equity firm.

However, what is interesting in this developing story is that Twitter’s Board of Directors has announced that it has adopted a poisoned pill approach, i.e. should any single shareholder hold more than 15% of the Twitter stock, the company will issue more shares to allow current shareholders to accumulate and buy more shares should they wish to. The aim of this, and why it’s called a poison pill, is to make any takeover bid more expensive than initially thought. In essence, Twitter’s board is blocking Musk.

Musk is not happy with this and has highlighted that members of Twitter’s board hardly Tweet or engage on the platform. Added to that, he stated that they barely own 1% of Twitter shares, all of them combined.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan and Musk are suing each other over other stock transactions, some of which are tied to Musk’s tweet in 2018 claiming that he had secured the funds to take Tesla private, an effort that was abandoned weeks later. Next week, the two parties are expected to appear in court.