Paul Singer, who is the billionaire founder of the activist fund Elliott Management, is now planning to replace Jack Dorsey as the Twitter CEO, according to report Friday.
HIGHLIGHTS:
- Elliott Management’s latest target is Twitter Inc, for implementing major changes, including replacement of the chief executive officer Jack Dorsey, as per to a report.
- Elliott has a “sizable” stake in Twitter, but at the same time, the exact size of the stake is not clear: Report
- Elliott has a long history of battling for changes at some of the largest companies in the world.
- No immediate response from Elliott Management; Twitter declined to comment.
Activist hedge fund Elliott Management is one of the biggest activist investors in the world with more than $40 billion in assets under management. It often pushes technology companies to improve their operations and has already targeted big companies such as eBay, AT&T, SoftBank, among others in the last months for improvements.
Now, Elliott Management target is microblogging and social network site, Twitter Inc, and is now pushing for major changes, out of which one is to remove the chief executive officer Jack Dorsey, as per to a report Friday by Bloomberg.
Jack Dorsey, who is Twitter chief executive, not only run Twitter but also Square, which is another publicly-traded company.
Other than that, Elliott, based in New York, has also nominated four directors to board of Twitter as well as also seeks for making other changes at the company. As far as the report is concerned, Elliott has a “sizable” stake in Twitter, but the exact size of the stake is still not clear.
For years, Twitter has been a potential target for activist investors as the company only has one class of stock, which in simple terms means that co-founder Dorsey doesn’t have any strong voting control of the company similar to Facebook Inc’s Mark Zuckerberg or else co-founders of Snap i.e., Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy.
Furthermore, Dorsey is one of the only people who serve as CEO of not only one but two large public companies (he also runs Square Inc) at the same time. Due to this, it makes him a potential target for criticism every time Twitter stumbles.
This sudden news comes at a challenging time for Twitter, as the social network making he attempts to deal with election disinformation, abuse along with other additional issues with the platform. The stock of Twitter also rose more than 7% in after-hours trading.
One motive Elliott is pushing for the takeover is due to Dorsey’s time is split amid running two public companies, Twitter as well as the payments firm Square, as per the reports. In addition to that, Dorsey’s plans to spend up to six months in Africa this year is another concern for Elliott, the report added. However, Elliott isn’t the only investor who is voicing the concerns about Dorsey and Twitter’s governance.
In the meantime, Twitter declined to make any comment on this regard. Elliott Management on the other hand also didn’t straight away respond to a request for comment.
