Could/should altruistic activist investors buy lots of Twitter stock, then pressure them to do altruistic things?
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So, Jack Dorsey just resigned from Twitter.
Some people on Hacker News are pointing out that Twitter has had recent issues with activist investors, and that this move might make those investors happy.
From a quick look… Twitter stock really hasn’t been doing very well. It’s almost back at its price in 2014.
Square, Jack Dorsey’s other company (he was CEO of two), has done much better. Market cap of over 2x Twitter ($100B), huge gains in the last 4 years.
I’m imagining that if I were Jack… leaving would have been really tempting. On one hand, I’d have Twitter, which isn’t really improving, is facing activist investor attacks, and worst, apparently is responsible for global chaos (of which I barely know how to stop). And on the other hand, there’s this really tame payments company with little controversy.
Being CEO of Twitter seems like one of the most thankless big-tech CEO positions around.
That sucks, because it would be really valuable if some great CEO could improve Twitter, for the sake of humanity.
One small silver lining is that the valuation of Twitter is relatively small. It has a market cap of $38B. In comparison, Facebook/Meta is $945B and Netflix is $294B.
So if altruistic interests really wanted to… I imagine they could become activist investors, but like, in a good way? I would naively expect that even with just 30% of the company you could push them to do positive things. $12B to improve global epistemics in a major way.
The US could have even bought Twitter for 4% of the recent $1T infrastructure bill. (though it’s probably better that more altruistic ventures do it).
If middle-class intellectuals really wanted it enough, theoretically they could crowdsource the cash.
I think intuitively, this seems like clearly a tempting deal.
I’d be curious if this would be a crazy proposition, or if this is just not happening due to coordination failures.
Admittingly, it might seem pretty weird to use charitable/foundation dollars on “Buying lots of Twitter” instead of direct aid, but the path to impact is pretty clear.
Could/should altruistic activist investors buy lots of Twitter stock, then pressure them to do altruistic things?
---
So, Jack Dorsey just resigned from Twitter.
Some people on Hacker News are pointing out that Twitter has had recent issues with activist investors, and that this move might make those investors happy.
https://pxlnv.com/linklog/twitter-fleets-elliott-management/
From a quick look… Twitter stock really hasn’t been doing very well. It’s almost back at its price in 2014.
Square, Jack Dorsey’s other company (he was CEO of two), has done much better. Market cap of over 2x Twitter ($100B), huge gains in the last 4 years.
I’m imagining that if I were Jack… leaving would have been really tempting. On one hand, I’d have Twitter, which isn’t really improving, is facing activist investor attacks, and worst, apparently is responsible for global chaos (of which I barely know how to stop). And on the other hand, there’s this really tame payments company with little controversy.
Being CEO of Twitter seems like one of the most thankless big-tech CEO positions around.
That sucks, because it would be really valuable if some great CEO could improve Twitter, for the sake of humanity.
One small silver lining is that the valuation of Twitter is relatively small. It has a market cap of $38B. In comparison, Facebook/Meta is $945B and Netflix is $294B.
So if altruistic interests really wanted to… I imagine they could become activist investors, but like, in a good way? I would naively expect that even with just 30% of the company you could push them to do positive things. $12B to improve global epistemics in a major way.
The US could have even bought Twitter for 4% of the recent $1T infrastructure bill. (though it’s probably better that more altruistic ventures do it).
If middle-class intellectuals really wanted it enough, theoretically they could crowdsource the cash.
I think intuitively, this seems like clearly a tempting deal.
I’d be curious if this would be a crazy proposition, or if this is just not happening due to coordination failures.
Admittingly, it might seem pretty weird to use charitable/foundation dollars on “Buying lots of Twitter” instead of direct aid, but the path to impact is pretty clear.
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