Chairman Omid Kordestani and Twitter Board to Blame

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 5:14AM EST · Published Jul 27, 7:55AM EDT

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Chairman Omid Kordestani and Twitter Board to Blame — © Wikimedia Commons

The executive chairman of Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR), Omid Kordestani, is largely to blame for the company’s share price. He and the board picked CEO Jack Dorsey and have continued to support him as disaster after disaster have ruined the company.

Twitter’s eight other board members are equally to blame. They include Peter Fenton, who has been on the board since 2009; Hugh Johnston, who became a board member this year; Martha Lane Fox, who joined in 2016 as well; Debra L. Lee, who joined this year; David Rosenblatt, who has been a board member since 2010; Marjorie Scardino; Bret Taylor, who joined this year; and Evan Williams, on the board since 2007 and a Twitter founder.

The board is stacked with new members and one who helped start the company. That is not a very favorable combination for shareholders.

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There is a temptation among new board members to keep quiet and not rock the boat until they have learned more about the company. It does not take long to learn that its stock price has dropped 50% in a year, or that it dropped another 10% after the company announced earnings. It does not take a longer period of education to realize that the Twitter user base is not growing, nor that revenue moved up only 20% to $605 million in the second quarter.

The board must know that Dorsey was the wrong selection as chief executive officer. He is not a turnaround expert or a gifted marketer.

Twitter’s runway to prove it is viable, standalone business is very short. If it fails in an attempt to reinvent itself, the board will be very much at fault. That is why it owes shareholders a change of management, if only to take a failed CEO and replace him with one who has more promise.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.