Even Bosses Have Bosses
Jack Dorsey is an American billionaire with a side hustle in online payments. He recently created Silicon Valley start-up, Square, and he’s traded stocks on and off throughout his life.
Much more vehemently, though, he’s Bitcoin-crazy. He wants to work remotely from the plains of Africa to avoid “everything else going on” in corporate America, and, in case you didn’t know, he’s the CEO of Twitter!
Investors have watched their Twitter shares stagger and stumble behind tech peers since day one, but they’ve rarely seen corrective action from the top. Dorsey’s never prioritized profitability, and that’s frustrated market players who view his platform as one of the greatest of this generation. There’s got to be money in it, so cue to the activists!
This month, Wall Street titans Silver Lake and Elliot Management bought enough Twitter shares to shake things up. A classic corporate raid, the forced entry saw investors rejoice as “two of their own” snatched control.
Things quickly got personal. A classic boardroom war has broken out, as reading between the lines of official statements, the activists have tried to oust Dorsey. Investors would have celebrated his demise, but a passive-aggressive agreement has been reached to save his job, for now.
The board of directors has been overhauled to make it a den of Silver Lake and Elliot execs. They’ll keep #jack on a tight lead, put objectives in front of him, and hold him to strict performance reviews. It’s not what investors originally hoped for, but it could still prove the impetus to get that stock price up in the short-term. That’s what Silver Lake and Elliot are for!
Let this serve as a high profile reminder; everyone has a boss!
