As activist billionaire investor Elliot Management’s pressure to remove Jack Dorsey as Twitter CEO inches up, support for Dorsey is being shown through the hash tag #WeBackJack on Twitter. Among pro-Dorsey tweets is a tweet by Elon Musk who tweeted “Just wanted to say that I support @Jack as CEO.”
He followed this up saying that he had a good heart with the usage of a ‘heart emoticon’ to signify it.
Elon Musk’s support could be due to a spectrum of different reasons. For one, he is an entrepreneur with multiple high pressure, successful businesses running, and hence understands the pressures of handling such positions. Occupying these positions have led to Musk having a long history of quarrels with financial foes, thus his understanding of the Dorsey situation. Two, Dorsey is among the most prominent and rather respected entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, thus warranting Musk’s support.
Just want say that I support @Jack as Twitter CEO. He has a good ❤️.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 3, 2020
This is not the first instance of wherein Musk has supported Dorsey or vice-versa. At an event early this year, Dorsey turned to Musk on advice on how to make Twitter a better platform. Musk has over 31 Million followers on the social media site. The billionaire inventor entrepreneur recommended actions against trolls and bots on the site.
Various other pro-Dorsey tweets have surfaced on twitter as well. Allie Kish tweeted “The purpose, the people, the planet. Thank you for always putting these first @Jack.” She followed it up with the hashtag #WeBackJack. Other tweets included that of Tom Tarantino and Matthew Bennett.
A section of employees rushed to defend their CEO through the hashtag used to propagate the movement. One twitter employee tweeted “I can’t stand people that make it difficult for good people to do good. With everything going on in the world, we deserve more good people” Another employee Stewart Cornelius, a partnerships solutions manager writes “I have worked for many CEOs in the last 13 years and none have the empathy or self-awareness that Jack has”.
Paul Singer’s activist hedge fund Elliot Management recently obtained a 5% stake in Twitter, and has since been reportedly pushing for a change of CEO. The hedge fund will now be seeking to install its own nominees to the eight-member board when three of the director positions are up for re-election. Media reports say that the activist hedge fund is now launching a pressure campaign to replace Dorsey in the top position.
The San-Francisco based company has fallen behind many of its rivals on the business front, largely sticking to its core features while others continued to diversify. Competitors like Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram have been regularly putting in new (albeit unnecessary) features. Twitter’s shares have tumbled by about 6% since Jack Dorsey took over in 2015. Facebook’s, at the same time, grew by almost 120%.
Twitter had last year also reported a failure to target ads and provide data to partners, which it said was caused by “bugs”. It also said at the time that its privacy issues involving targeting data would continue to weigh on its advertising business. This led to the stock declining more than 20 percent on October 24 after the company delivered third-quarter results that fell far short of analyst estimates.
