Twitter (TWTR) Shareholders overwhelmingly approved the company’s planned $44 billion sale to Elon Musk on September 13, but there appears to have been a notable lack of action.
According to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, only about 60% of the shares outstanding were voted on at the meeting earlier this week to consider the deal.
The company said in the filing that a total of 459.6 million shares were voted on at the meeting.
Of those, 453.1 million, or 98.6%, voted in favor of the plan to sell the company to Musk, while 4.1 million, 0.9%, voted “no” and 2.4 million, or 0.5%, abstained, the company said.
Musk, who is trying to get out of the agreement, is Twitter’s largest single contributor. The mercurial entrepreneur claims that the company failed to provide accurate information about the number of fake or spam accounts active on the site. The company said about 5%. Musk, who has more than 100 million followers on Twitter, claimed it was likely a much higher percentage.
As of September 9, Musk owned 73.1 million shares, or 9.6% of Twitter’s outstanding shares, according to an SEC filing.
This raises some interesting questions about whether or not he voted for his shares.
Musk may not have voted
Most likely, Musk did not bother to vote, knowing that the outcome was inevitable anyway. He’s a busy man, after all.
However, if he had voted his stock against the deal, the number of “no” votes would have risen to about 77 million.
The deal could have been approved, but at 85% instead of 98%. A “No” vote would have come in at 14.5%, while an abstention would have represented only 0.45% of the votes cast.
There are other possibilities, of course. Musk may have walked away to avoid giving any credence to an act he no longer believed had any legitimacy. If you are arguing that the deal is no longer valid, it makes no sense to take a position one way or the other.
The third possibility, which would be Musk’s character at his fiercest, is that he voted to approve the deal, only to manipulate people.
Regardless, the next round of the fight is scheduled to take place in a Delaware courtroom next month, where there is a five-day trial of lawsuits arising from Musk’s attempt to exit the deal.
