re: Twitter rejects offer at $54/share from Musk, adopts Poison Pill strategy to fend him off

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Not really. The board has already shown they don't give a frick what sharehokders think.

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Who elects the board?

Meanwhile, Twitter is actually up 4 or 5% right now.

I tweeted encouraging Twitter to "swallow that poison pill"

They limited my account for "violating our rules against promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm."

I appealed their decision by quoting every major news org that was tweeting about Twitter opting for a poison pill. They are a joke.

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Who elects the board?

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Shareholder meeting upcoming on May 25th. Will the masses fire the board or will they just click the approve all button on the proxy vote website or ignore the vote entirely.

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The public threat of dilution of the stock is going to scare off any investor who has an IQ above 2.

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I mean this study found 4,479 adoptions of the poison pill from 1997-2015 (over 200 per year), so it's clearly quite common (really common during the dotcom bubble).

In addition, it looked at the abnormal returns of the stocks in the days following the adoption. Of the 3,625 companies with enough financial data for the analysis, the average abnormal return was +3.97% after 3 days, +4.54% after 5 days, and 4.91% after 7 days. So the return increased with time post-adoption, and more companies had a positive return (2,052 or ~56.6% after 3 days; 2,104 or ~58% after 7 days).

So clearly this tactic doesn't automatically scare off investors, and if anything, actually increases returns.

In addition, from what I've seen, despite this being adopted thousands of times, I don't think a single time it's actually been triggered, so clearly it's effective as a preventative measure without incurring the costs/risks of the triggering it and diluting shares.

In addition, adopting it doesn't mean that it won't eventually accept a takeover/acquisition offer, but it does allow time to consider options and potentially drive up the bidding price, whether luring additional buyers or forcing the original bidder to up the bid.

And it's not like Musk's $54.20 bid is a huge premium, at roughly 18% the current market price and about 25% lower than the 52 week high last July (about 30% lower than the all time high last February). Private buyouts typically have at least a 20-40 percent premium, but with so much money (often dumb money, IMO) in private equity, overall premiums for public buyouts were at about 42% last year on average last year with some some approaching 70%. And that's when prices were even higher across the market.

The use of poison pills by US firms over the period 1997–2015: what has been their impact on shareholder value?