Skip to main content

Deck.blue brings a TweetDeck experience to Bluesky users

With over 3 million users and plans to open up more broadly in the months ahead, Bluesky is still establishing itself as an alternative to Twitter/X. However, that hasn’t stopped the developer community from embracing the project and building tools to meet the needs of those fleeing the now Elon Musk-owned social network, formerly known […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/TBbEAPF

With board’s dissolution, Elon is ‘sole director’ of Twitter

Elon Musk is now lord of the manor over at Twitter after the board of directors was dissolved as part of the merger agreement. While the state of affairs likely isn’t permanent, it does mean that as owner, director, and “Chief Twit,” he has what amounts to ultimate power to hire, fire, and change the social media platform.

In an SEC filing, the company detailed some of the many changes having to do with the controversial purchase of the platform by Musk:

[A]s a result of the consummation of the Merger, Mr. Musk became the sole director of Twitter. In accordance with the terms of the Merger Agreement, effective as of the effective time of the Merger, the following persons, who were directors of Twitter prior to the effective time of the Merger, are no longer directors of Twitter: Bret Taylor, Parag Agrawal, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li and Mimi Alemayehou.

You may recognize some or all of those names, and certainly the Twitter board was quite a who’s-who of Silicon Valley. But their watch is finished and the deal they squabbled over is complete.

This is not some unprecedented move in a private takeover of a public company, just a part of the process. The board of directors represented the former shareholders and now those shares are owned by someone else. It’s not rare for a board to be cleared this way, and new ones installed as a decision-making and advisory body adjacent to company leadership. That said, because examples of private takeovers at this scale are so few, let alone examples with comparable context, it’s difficult to say with any confidence what would be “normal.”

The result, at all events, is that right now Twitter has what amounts to a dictator, and that dictator is reportedly using that power to enact sweeping changes like company-wide cuts and charging for verification.

How Musk intends to structure leadership at Twitter is still something of a mystery, probably as much to him as anyone else, but as sole director it’s pretty much his prerogative. It may be that part of the complex and risky financing of the deal entails the installation of certain persons (or indeed kingdoms) in positions of real power and responsibility.

Of course Musk is not doing all this alone — he has reportedly surrounded himself with various cronies and operators who, though lacking any actual power as yet, are no doubt doing their utmost to influence the sole director.

With board’s dissolution, Elon is ‘sole director’ of Twitter by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/W8uIr4G

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Nimbus launches tiny EV prototype that’s like a motorbike with a roof

As shared e-scooter companies have infiltrated cities and e-bike sales have soared, micromobility has been offered up as a panacea to save us all from the ill humors and packed streets caused by gas-guzzling cars. However, one of the major roadblocks in front of well-intentioned city dwellers who’d love to trade in their cumbersome and environmentally unfriendly vehicles for an e-bike or scooter remains: What happens when it rains? Nimbus, a California-based electric vehicle startup, wants to solve that problem with a simple solution: Put a roof on it. The company recently came out of stealth with a prototype for its Nimbus One, a tiny, three-wheeled EV that “combines the convenience and cost of a motorbike with the safety and comfort of a car.” The Nimbus One. Image Credits: Nimbus The thin, pod-like vehicle is only about 2.75 feet wide and 7.5 feet long, which Nimbus says makes it three to five times smaller than a compact car — the better to park and navigate busy urban stree...

Pitch Deck Teardown: Encore’s $3M seed deck

For this week’s Pitch Deck Teardown, I’m (virtually) traveling to Sweden to take a look at the $3 million seed round raised by developer tool startup Encore . The company is creating what it calls a software development platform for the cloud. It reportedly raised from Crane Venture Partners with Acequia Capital ,  Essence Venture Capital  and  Third Kind Venture Capital joining the round. I wanted to take a look at this deck in more detail, in particular, because it tells a really elegant story in a market where it’s extraordinarily hard to differentiate yourself — both to your customers and to investors! Pitching a dev tool in a way that tells the story well enough to understand but without dropping deep into a rabbit hole is a particularly hard challenge, and that’s the needle Encore threads ever so efficiently in this 24-slide pitch deck. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that ....

Multifamily housing has missed the solar boom. PearlX wants to fix that with $70M Series B

If you’re a renter and you want solar power, you’re usually out of luck. For most, the only option is a community solar program, where people subscribe to utility-scale projects, but they’re not available everywhere. And given that most renters only stay for a few years, which of them are going to pay tens of thousands of dollars for solar panels — and what landlord would let them? That’s where PearlX comes in. “Think of us as like the Sunrun for renters,” said co-founder and CEO Michael Huerta, referring to the company that rents solar installations to single-family homeowners. “PearlX is a rental electrification platform.” Earlier this year, the startup began installing solar panels and backup batteries at multifamily rentals in Texas as part of its “TexFlex” project. PearlX’s next step, which Huerta shared exclusively with TechCrunch, will be a California expansion called “Flexifornia.” The startup is also rolling out a virtual power plant, which will allow the company to tap the...