You're claiming that Musk's purchase of twitter is objectively good for shareholders
One of my favorite books: "Small giants, companies that choose to be great instead of big"
Note that I'm all for companies having much more legal responsibility to other stakeholders, not just shareholders, but that is somewhat irrelevant for a discussion of whether the board could be successfully sued over adopting this decision.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-15/sure-e...
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...
For a real alternative to succeed, solid backers focused on dethroning tw are needed to inspire confidence and stability, then we all need to jump at about the same time to get the momentum going and bounce out of the twatterverse.
As it stands now, there is no real competition.
That's exactly the point - there is no reason to believe this would change if Musk created his own social network.
Most rejected the overall concept. The amt of users that stil want something similar but not Twitter AND who will be appeased by whatever alt Twitter is made is an even smaller number.
He wouldn't bother because it'd be a failure. Twitter's tech stack isn't worth 40 billion, Musk could clone twitter for less than $500m, but just having a platform doesn't accomplish much, the overwhelming majority of twitter users have no reason to leave twitter.
The world is littered with the expensive corpses of failed software.
Google's product lacked purpose. It died because of a lack of vision and leadership and product mistakes (real names).
It died prematurely. Google treated the product like a pilot a network threw on the first week of September. It had solid numbers and given time it could have found itself if it found a backer in leadership.
But if France put a bid on twitter, they would be forced to entertain the offer.
And existing investors all have the option to cash out today for just 17% less than Musk's final offer.
a: You're dreaming.
b: You're absolutely expecting a quick short-term gain.
To put this in perspective, 20x in 5 years is an 82% CAGR. And five years is far short of the length of an economic cycle. Traditionally, "long term investing" meant across at least one whole business cycle.
Vote with your dollars: buy shares at a price higher than Elon's. Borrow if you must. If you are not ready to take that risk, then maybe your expectations are more wishful thinking than anything real.
They do not have an offer that will maximize shareholder value - they have an offer that will increase it.
Words have meaning and concepts have definitions. They are not arbitrary of flexible for the sake of making the argument you want.
The BOD's responsibility is to the company, a public company's responsibility is to the shareholders - this difference matters.
Cornell's legal information institute provides a nice and cited set of definitions (albeit in legalese) - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty
you have a company that is worth $1mil and we only imagine that it can be worth $100mil (based on the size of the market we are addressing). someone comes and offers $200mil but we know he will shut the company down (i.e. liquidate all its assets, or even simply the desire to destroy the company).
While this might be sad for the company, why is it not in the interests of the shareholders to take the offer?
so if Musk is willing to offer more than shareholders expect to see in the forseable future, why does it matter what will happen to the company after that? their interest in the company ends when their shares are purchased.
That is your assertion/opinion (yes, shared by many, sure). But it's not the only opinion in this case, and so I don't think the analogy holds.
Sure, I could see in the abstract times where an offer it just unavoidably good, and so it would not be in the best interest of shareholders to take it. But in this specific instance, there is a lot to be said on both sides of the offer (taking vs. rejecting it).
I would also argue that, depending on the purpose and goals of the company, knowing that a person intends to shut it down would be a reason to value existing (in order to continue carrying out their purpose) over money.
This isn't an argument for the poison pill clause, but is an answer to the following quoted question. It is funny to see this motivation of most existing shareholders ignored in order to bring into being analogous motivations of another. Especially when Musk's offer for Twitter has been in order to change it promote certain values, but conspicuously, better profits has not been one of those touted values.
> While this might be sad for the company, why is it not in the interests of the shareholders to take the offer?
I will sabotage my own argument somewhat though and say that I believe the economic motive dominates over time and is almost always (in macro and micro) the primary force.
People with more complicated positions should consider covariance and factor in uncertainty. But if you’re a shareholder in a single stock and estimate that it’s overvalued by a significant margin, the rational choice is to sell your position, invest in a low risk, highly liquid asset, and rebuy.
The historical price is irrelevant as well. Looking at the historical price is the same sort of thinking that leads to "throwing good money after bad".