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of Twitter “digital town squareVictorious Elon Musk is a place where issues vital to the future of humanity are discussed. his deal to buy the social media platform.

In other words, Twitter is no ordinary company. It serves as something akin to a public service, a unique global communication tool.

So should Twitter be run like a traditional public company, with a board of directors focused primarily on raising as much money as possible for shareholders, with little regard for the interests of other groups?

In the eyes of some influential business and legal experts, the answer is no. The company’s executives also had to evaluate Mr. Musk’s qualifications to serve as a responsible steward for a vital public communication channel – and based on public comments by Twitter’s board, there is no evidence that he did so.

“The board had to consider the interests of stakeholders such as employees and users when assessing the long-term value of the company,” said Lenore Palladino, associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and fellow at the progressive Roosevelt Institute. in New York.

Mr. Musk is a polarizing figure. He is a world-changing entrepreneur responsible for companies that have revolutionized massive industries such as PayPal and Tesla. He has used his significant influence – he has 85 million Twitter followers – to oppose what he sees as a censoring liberal culture in technology and media.

He’s also reckless and capricious at times—features that have gotten him in trouble with federal regulators and are at the end of a defamation lawsuit, among other issues. Just last week, he regiment Beer belly after Bill Gates’ Microsoft co-founder was said to have bet against Tesla’s stock price.

The question is whether any of these were, or should have been, really instrumental in Twitter’s board’s decision to sell the company to Mr.

In recent years, American corporations and their boards of directors have operated under a legal doctrine known as “shareholder priority”, which suggests that corporate boards should focus on a single goal – maximizing shareholder returns.

Twitter chairman Bret Taylor took a close look at this doctrine when he said Monday that the board is evaluating Mr.

He could also be referring to a tool and die maker.

Not even a false tribute was given to Twitter’s other stakeholders—its users, employees, and advertisers, to name a few—or its profound importance in public discourse. It’s unclear whether the board members even touched on these issues, which seemed like a weekend full of negotiations.

Under current law, mostly established by Delaware courts, boards “have the discretion, but not the obligation,” to consider the interests of individuals other than their investors, said Jill Fisch, professor of employment law at the Carey School of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. But few, if any, exercised that discretion, she said.

In recent years, this model of shareholder priority has come under attack from critics who claim it enriches shareholders at the expense of pretty much everything and everyone: workers, customers, innovation, planet.

“Corporate leaders and practitioners pledge to pay more and more attention to the interests of stakeholders, such as customers or society, and not just shareholders, in the Twitter example,” said Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School. Even so, a study of more than 100 deals that Mr. Bebchuk recently completed, worth over $1 billion, found that there were “big wins” for shareholders and corporate leaders and little to no impact for other voters.

Massachusetts professor Ms. Palladino said on Twitter that “we need to fundamentally change the approach to corporate governance”.

Mr Musk said he didn’t buy Twitter to make money (even though he claims the company plans to “lock out” its potential). This is likely cause for concern. Public shareholders, like other shareholders seeking to maximize their profits, have a financial incentive to attract and maintain the largest number of users. This means that management needs to thwart extremists to avoid offending or driving more users away, while trying to ban as few users as possible to increase the platform’s value for advertisers.

On the other hand, he leaves the company’s management hostage to the whims of Wall Street, whose interests may not quite align with those of the wider public.

Since the takeover bid was made public earlier this month, Mr. Musk has been talking about his plans to promote Twitter as a bastion of free speech. On Monday, said “Even my worst critics will stay on Twitter because that’s what freedom of speech means.”

While Mr. Musk’s public comments so far have been soothing to free speech advocates, especially those on the right who claim Big Tech has silenced conservative views, there’s no guarantee that Mr. Musk will continue to embrace these broad-minded views once again. under control.

Since Mr. Musk has given up on profit motives, he may not care who he offends by acknowledging extremists or banning his accusers. This man once called a rescuer The worker is a “pedo man” after criticizing Mr. Musk. He was careful not to say where Twitter’s current administration would draw the line between free speech and hateful or violent speech, which it has sought to curtail, with a particularly flawed track record.

In a way, it’s easy to sympathize with the Twitter board’s eagerness to get out of this hornet’s nest while enriching shareholders. Turning down a takeover offer at a premium to the company’s current share price would be a recipe for litigation. Accepting the offer was a form of least resistance, and Ms Fisch said it was unlikely to be successfully challenged in court. or held by federal regulators.

On the other hand, Twitter has a lot more danger than a normal corporate action (although you could make a similar claim about its parent company, CNN). taken this month Discovery Inc. or any other company allegedly serving the public interest for that matter).

Perhaps Mr. Musk will prove to be a good steward of the digital town square he will soon have; It’s perfectly reasonable for the board to conclude that if Musk had seriously considered the possibility of interfering based on his ideology or personal interests, he would have been a relatively safe couple. After all, Twitter, in its current cacophonous state, is not a utopia of moderate civil discourse.

But the board’s response to Mr. Musk need not be based on any subjective assessment of his character or motives.

As Ms Palladino pointed out, the board could have taken a position that the most important thing to Twitter’s long-term value was the public interest and that it was in no one’s interest but short-term transactions to sell Twitter to any single, private buyer. period speculators and Mr. Musk himself.