Twitter shares drop as Elon Musk gives up planning to join the board

Twitter Shares fell in pre-market trading on Monday after CEO Parag Agrawal revealed that Elon Musk abandoned his plan To join the company’s board of directors.

The social media company’s stock fell more than 8% to less than $43 a share at 4 a.m. ET before recovering slightly.

On April 5, Musk and Twitter said it would be Join the Twitter board. The day before, it was a file Tesla And the CEO of SpaceX revealed via financial filings that he is the largest shareholder of Twitter, owning 9.2% of the company.

Musk was supposed to be appointed to Twitter’s board of directors on Saturday, but the world’s richest man told the company that day that he would not, in fact, take a board seat. The investor relations page on Twitter has not been updated and Musk is still listed as a member of the board of directors.

“Elon has decided not to join our Board of Directors,” Agrawal wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “I sent a brief note to the company, I share with you all here.”

In the memo, Agrawal said that Musk remains Twitter’s largest shareholder, and the company will remain open to his input.

“We were excited about collaboration and clarity about the risks,” he wrote. “We also believed that having Elon as a fiduciary agent for the company where he, like all members of the board of directors, must act in the best interests of the company and all of our shareholders was the best way forward.”

The Twitter CEO did not say whether Musk had given specific reasons for changing his mind about taking on the new commitment.

On Monday, after Musk’s share was initially revealed, Twitter had best day Since the company went public in 2013, it has jumped more than 27%.

Over the weekend, without revealing that he declined a board seat on Twitter, Musk posted a number of ideas for transforming the social media company and its products.

One suggestion was a blunt joke in the form of a Twitter poll. Musk asked people to vote on whether Twitter should remove the “w” from his name. Doing so will turn Twitter into a ” grudge,” a reference to female anatomy.

More serious suggestions from Musk have included leaving Twitter Blue Subscribers pay with Dogecoin, Get the “authentication” checkmark, and keep Twitter Blue ad-free.

“Everyone who subscribes to Twitter Blue (i.e. pays $3 a month) should get a check mark for authentication,” Musk wrote. “And there are no ads. The power of companies to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter relies on ad money to survive.”

Musk also suggested that his Twitter office turn his San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter, “since no one showed up anyway.”

He also referred to Twitter user numbers being inflated by bots and at one point asked if Twitter was dying.

– Additional reporting by Laura Kolodny.