In fact they have a fiduciary responsibility to pursue this.

People keep saying this... But twitter board accepts the very first offer from Musk.

Who does that in a business negotiation?

Someone who's being offered $10 for a $5 bill.

You would try to get $12 at least before accepting $10.

>But twitter board accepts the very first offer from Musk.

Is this true?

From here it seems to have gone up for $43 billion to $44 billion somehow after the initial offer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_acquisition_of_Twitte...

I'm not sure if that is because of a modified offer, or the offer was based on some benchmark that had dropped (he already had a large portion of Twitter's shares).

Also between April 14th when he initially made an initial offer and April 25th when they accepted one, the bottom had started falling out. Facebook, in the same sector had dropped by around 10%, so by the time they accepted it was much more attractive.

Musk seems to have timed the offer and the initial separate share purchase all horribly wrong.

From what I've read, they're obligated to accept that sort of offer for their shareholders.

They're not obligated to; boards can pretty much do whatever they want.

However, Twitter's board doesn't use Twitter and doesn't actually seem to care about it at all, so they're not exactly going to claim to shareholders they can run it better than an offer that much above its current value.

> Twitter's board doesn't use Twitter

[citation needed]

Aren't they obligated to negotiate for a higher price? At least, they should try.

Who the heck doesn't negotiate?

How is no negotiation the best strategy?

Hmm this might be hard for you to believe but I've never negotiated in my life. I always accept asked price. Didn't realize this is not the norm. This is not in business context though.

You are not running a $30b company.

At work, I was involved in a deal with a large company. The numbers are back and forth like 10 times with adds-on and discounts. It's just standard stuff.

Yes but it was clear (to all outside observers, not the board apparently) that Musk never intended to pay the agreed price. He was just collecting enough material from them to justify his breach, and fake users was a smokescreen. Their response to any questions/statements about fake users should have been the equivalent of "you signed the agreement, now stick to it" not "let's work together and resolve your issues".

So? What does twitter care whether he intended to do it? He agreed to! And they can still force him to do it. So even if he drags out the litigation, they still have a strong position to negotiate a settlement for somewhere between 1 and 40 billion. Free money for his stupidity.

I’m not terribly familiar with the specifics of the deal but IIRC there’s a penalty clause that’s dependent on who, ultimately, backs out of the deal. It seems like Musk is angling to get Twitter to pull out and Twitter is doing everything they can to engage with Musk’s requests in “good faith” so he can’t claim Twitter has constructively backed out— a bit of M&A malicious compliance/a game of chicken, I believe.

They said “let’s work together “ precisely to be able to sue and increase their chances of win for acting in good faith.

That’s not how i remember the last HN discussion on this

are you saying it is 100% impossible that there really is way more than 5% of daily active users being bots? unless you have some information here, it seems like a fairly big claim to make? if elon musk thinks 20% is bots, that is a very different thing than <=5%, would you not agree?

Everyone talking about this claim drops the important word. Less than 5% of _monetizable_ daily active users are bots. A non-monetizable user can exist and many do: people with ad blockers, people using third party Twitter clients, and people using APIs to interact with Twitter. Bot accounts are very likely to not be counted as monetizable daily active uers.

wouldnt a bot user by definition not be monetizable? I dont think this is what it is about at all, it makes no sense? They public a count of daily active users, this includes bots. The amount of those daily active users is very important