Elon Musk, the billionaire boss of Tesla and SpaceX, resigned from the board of directors of Twitter, of which he is the main shareholder, the CEO of the social network announced on Sunday night.
“Elon has decided not to join our board of directors,” tweeted Parag Agrawal.
“Elon’s arrival on the board of directors was to be formalized on April 9, but Elon made it known this morning that he would not be joining the board,” he explained in a message to staff at Twitter, who shared it on the platform. “I think it’s the best”.
“We appreciate and will always continue to appreciate the participation of our shareholders, whether or not they have a seat on our board. Elon is our largest shareholder and we will remain open to participation from him,” Agrawal added.
Musk, the world’s richest man, announced in early April that he had acquired a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the largest shareholder.
Agrawal indicated on Tuesday that Musk would join the board, describing him as “a passionate believer and an intense critic of the service, which is exactly what we need.”
And Musk himself tweeted that he was “looking forward to working with Parag and the Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in the coming months!”
However, in his announcement on Sunday, Agrawal shared a note he sent to Twitter, saying that Musk’s appointment to the board would be subject to a background check and that he would have to act in the company’s interest once named.
Controversial
In an apparent reaction to the news, Musk tweeted a smiley emoji, without further comment.
Before entering the capital of the company, Musk was already an active user of the social network, in which he has 80.5 million followers and often mixes incendiary statements with capricious or business comments.
He has also repeatedly clashed with federal securities regulators, who cracked down on his use of social media after an alleged effort to take Tesla public failed in 2018.
In fact, Musk specified in the document transmitted to the stock market regulator that his participation in Twitter would be “passive”, that is, he did not plan to influence major strategic decisions.
But he kept multiplying the provocations. Among other things, she polled his profile to ask Twitter users if they wanted to add a feature to “modify” tweets after posting. Almost 4.4 million people voted and about 73% said yes.
The platform then announced that it wanted to test this function, which had been requested for years by numerous users.
On Saturday, Musk also wondered if the social network was “dying,” mentioning inactive accounts despite having many followers, such as that of singer Justin Bieber.
According to him Washington Postseveral Twitter employees shared their concerns, considering that the values of the richest man in the world were not in line with the business culture of the social network.
