Twitter’s Mediocre Results Will Be Hammered by Takeover

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 21, 7:30AM EDT

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Twitter’s Mediocre Results Will Be Hammered by Takeover — © Scott Olson / Getty Images

Wall Street has been disappointed by Twitter’s performance for several quarters. Over the past year, despite a bump in its share price due to a takeover offer by Elon Musk, the stock is off by 32%. Several analysts have pointed out that the battle for the control of the company will involve extraordinary time from management. If Musk has his way, many of Twitter’s leaders suddenly will find themselves without jobs, which will create an even bigger vacuum.
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The period investors care about is not the only sign of trouble at Twitter. Its latest earnings release showed that average monetizable daily active users in the fourth quarter rose very little from the prior quarter. Earnings dropped from $0.28 per share to $0.23. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey then unexpectedly walked out the door. It was hardly a vote of confidence, given that he is also a large shareholder.
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The only thing distinctive about Twitter’s board is that three current and past officers serve alongside David Rosenblatt, the CEO of 1stdibs.com, and Mimi Alemayehou, a senior vice president at Mastercard, neither of whom is qualified for the job.

Also, there is the fact that a Twitter insider, Parag Agrawal, took over as chief executive, and most of Twitter’s management also has been part of the company during its troubled recent period.
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One reason that Twitter is such a ready takeover target is that it has been unable to articulate anything close to an intelligible strategic plan for the future. Musk may not be considered an entirely stable owner, but he is among the most visionary CEOs of the past several decades.
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Twitter management has earned a takeover and a chance that they, along with the board, will be ousted. Add to their poor management the fact that they are preoccupied with Musk.

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.