Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has decided not to join Twitter’s board of directors, the social media firms’s chief Parag Agrawal announced on Monday.
The announcement comes six days after Agrawal had said that Musk will join the board. On April 4, the Tesla CEO had bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter, which made him the biggest shareholder in the company.
On Monday, Agrawal said that Musk was to be appointed to the board “contingent on a background check and formal acceptance”. He added that the Tesla CEO was slated to officially join the board on April 9, but he declined not do so.
“I believe this is for the best,” the Twitter CEO said in a note to the company that he later shared on the microblogging platform. “We have and will always value input from our shareholders, whether they are on our Board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input.”
Agrawal said that he and the Twitter board believed that having Musk as a fiduciary of the company would be the best path forward. He added that Musk, in such a role, would have had to “act in the best interests of the company and all our shareholders”.
A fiduciary of a company is someone who is required to prioritise its well-being and avoid any conflicts of interest.
The Twitter chief executive officer said that the board was excited to collaborate with Musk and was clear about the risks involved in the process. Agrawal urged employees to “tune out the noise” and remain focused on work.
“There will be distractions ahead, but our goals and priorities remain unchanged,” he said. “The decisions we make and how we execute is in our hands, no one else’s.”
Musk owns 7.35 crore shares in Twitter, which amounts to stakes in the company worth $2.9 billion, (or about Rs 21,846 crore), according to filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Tesla CEO’s stakes in Twitter is over four times larger than that of the social media platform’s founder Jack Dorsey.
Musk is very active on Twitter and has more than eight crore followers on the platform.
On April 10, he had launched a poll asking users if they believed Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters should be converted into a homeless shelter “since no one shows up anyway”. More than 91% of the respondents answered in the affirmative.
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