Jack Dorsey must be a happy man right now- he lives to fight another day.
Twitter on Monday announced it had reached an agreement with activist investor Elliot Management and private equity firm Silver Lake that keeps Dorsey at the helm, for now. The announcement also mentions a $1 billion investment from investor Silver Lake that Twitter says will be used to undertake a $2 billion share repurchase program.
Twitter will nominate three new directors to its board as part of the agreement, with Elliott’s head of U.S. activism, Jesse Cohn, and Silver Lake’s co-chief executive officer Egon Durban, joining the social media site’s board immediately. The company plans to appoint a third new director in the near future.
“I am looking forward to working with Jack and the Board to help contribute to realizing Twitter’s full potential,” Jesse Cohn, partner at Elliott, said in a statement Monday.
As part of the agreement, the board will create a temporary committee to conduct a study on its leadership structure, CEO succession plan and share the results publicly before the end of the year.
Interestingly, the agreement makes no mention of a change at the top as was previously reported. Elliot Management, after acquiring a roughly $1 Billion stake in Twitter, had pushed for a total revamp in the hierarchy, including the ouster of CEO Jack Dorsey. But that seems to have subsided for now.
Dorsey’s management has often been questioned, with investors blaming him for not focusing on Twitter’s profitability, including Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter. The fact that Dorsey heads two companies simultaneously makes the criticism even more profound. Twitter’s shares have also tumbled by about 6% since Dorsey took over in 2015.
