Twitter was an unprofitable laughing stock until 2016, and with Trump gone they were very likely to revert to that whoever was in charge. It's hard to justify not taking twice what you're worth for that. Frankly even for employees, getting cashed out on your RSUs at double value and the option to walk away with 3 months' severance sounds better than staying there while it slowly runs into the ground.

Why is this myth so pervasive. Pre-musk, Twitter was making upwards of $1m per employee. If only we could all “fail” this way… It not being profitable was due to short term capital expenditures.

They've had literally two profitable quarters in their whole corporate history. They went from being considered an equal competitor to Facebook to... not, as Facebook was able to bring in advertising revenue and Twitter wasn't.

Every money-losing tech company claims that they could turn the spigot to profitability at any time and the reason they're not profitable is short term capital expenditures; the proof is in the pudding.

> Every money-losing tech company claims that they could turn the spigot to profitability at any time

A bit of an exaggeration but there is some truth here, tech companies are notorious for feeding all their revenue back into growth. However in Twitter’s case it was absolutely true. It had a solid perch and wasn’t going anywhere… until Elon took over and became Trump 2.0 except “this time, he owns the site!”

Twitter feed the money to their employees. Was a bad deal for shareholders

Twitter did tell him to buzz off at first. That was the point of the poison pill. Then he offered stupid amounts of money at astonishingly good terms. All along the way he took shots at Twitter that reduced its value.

Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept the deal at his offered price. When Musk wanted out the shareholders weren’t interested enough to even vote a second time.

It's a public company and the company executives act in the best interest of the shareholders not on their own personal political preferences

He was paying a premium. Shareholders wanted their payout.

The shareholders voted for it. The board effectively had to comply.

Not really, at least not within a reasonable amount of time to close the deal. Lots of Levine about how Musk couldn't really force the deal with a tender offer, right?

But, I mean, the board did the right thing; their obligation is to the shareholders, and the price Musk offered was absurdly high.

Once the vote happened I’m not sure the board could have stopped the deal without being sued forever. Rightly so, because it was such a high offer.

> couldn’t Twitter have simply told him to buzz off when he proposed buying the company

There are very few accounts here on HN that will sympathize with such an extremely uncapitalist, anarchist take.

It seems more syndicalist leaning to me, but yes. HN seems an odd place to bemoan a company taking the offer of a huge premium on its stock price.

The point is that even if Twitter execs personally wanted to say no, they would’ve been sued for not taking such a lucrative deal.

It was a public corporation, so their options were limited. They did try a poison pill. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/15/twitter-board-adopts-poison-...

Also an illegal take.

This is where the government should’ve protected our “town square” by blocking the deal (Elon has too many government military entanglements to be allowed to own a social media company, too many conflicts of interest, and Elon’s past history of using Twitter to flagrantly violate the law).

Expecting the shareholders not to take the money and run is unreasonable.

If by "people up top" you mean Twitter's board, they would have been sued seven ways to Sunday if they did not enforce the contract Elon signed.