Twitter Shareholder Travis: Musk Is Good

CLAY: Let’s go to Dana in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He’s got a question that you just heard. I thought Senator Hagerty of Tennessee just kind of laid it out there well about the potential lawsuits that might ensue over Twitter being more interested in protecting the company from being bought by Elon Musk than they are in actually maximizing shareholder value. Dana, what you got for us?

BUCK: A shrewd fellow, by the way.

CLAY: Yeah. No doubt.

BUCK: Go ahead, sir.

CALLER: First off, guys, NOLA retired Navy fighter pilot dittos to Rush’s memory and for the great job you guys have been doing. Love listening to you.

BUCK: Thank you.

CLAY: Well, thank you.

CALLER: That said, the Elon Musk thing and the attempt he’s making for the hostile takeover, I know that it has been indicated that the board has fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, and while I was on hold, I did some research as far as that is concerned, and there is obviously legal precedent for that, and I would think something like maybe the SEC would get involved and force them to comply with that or to step down as board members.

BUCK: The SEC is a federal agency. So they’ll do the bidding of the Biden regime. Not easy to say.

CLAY: Avik Roy, a friend of both of ours, super smart guy works, at Fre O-P-P, FREOPP, which is different from the song, but what he is — has pointed out is that there does seem to be a DOJ and SEC concerted effort to work against Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Why would that be? Well, Joe Biden knows that he may well have gotten elected president of the United States because of the protection that Twitter gave him as it relates to the Hunter Biden story.

I don’t think that’s a wild hyperbolic certification when you look at how close the election ended up being in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, among other states. So what you’re asking, Dana, I think is a really, really intriguing question, and that is this: Right now, Elon Musk is offering a 20% premium. Based on implementing this poison pill, Buck, I would expect if the markets were open today — and they’re closed for Good Friday.

I would expect that we will see Twitter stock decline substantially on Monday, absent any new information on Saturday, Sunday, or the remainder of Friday. That gap between — and I’m a shareholder. I’m a longtime Twitter shareholder. I would sell my stock right now for $54.20 to Elon Musk if I had that opportunity.

BUCK: I just want you to go to the board meeting with all the shareholders with the proxies and all that. I want the Clay Travis, instead of “Greed is Good,” “Musk is Good” speech, a la Gordon Gekko. You’d be the guy to do it.

CLAY: I don’t know if they limit you to, like, one minute or two minutes like they do. I imagine they do.

BUCK: Nah, you’d enthrall them. They’d go past.

CLAY: Refuse to pass the mic. And that lawsuit, which may well be… I’m not sure if the courts are open today all over the country, but I would expect that you will see shareholder lawsuits filed arguing that Twitter’s board has breached its fiduciary duty by not accepting the offer that Elon Musk has put on the table. And, as it moves forward, those could become even more legitimate because if Twitter doesn’t have bidder…

Now, to the board’s credit, if they end up finding somebody who’s gonna pay $60 a share, then they’re maximum moving shareholder value by selling it to somebody else. If they have no other bidders and they implemented this poison pill and Elon Musk is going to be forestalled from being able to acquire the company and the stock price declines $15/$20 below what Elon Musk is offering, there’s billions of dollars of legal exposure for the board there, and there’s a lot of plaintiff lawyers out there, I guarantee you, who do these shareholder lawsuits that are giddy about being able to file them.

BUCK: I’ll tell you this: I really do believe that, you know the “If I can’t have it, no one can” obsessive people in movies and stuff?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: I think that the libs who run Twitter and a lot of the people who are running around now were saying it is an existential threat to world peace if Elon Musk were to take over Twitter. If the choice were between letting Elon Musk have it or imploding the whole thing so there is no more Twitter, they would rather it implode, ’cause they still have all those other platforms.

If you gave members of the Twitter board — who are all very, very wealthy — the choice between Elon Musk take over and everyone at Twitter gets fired and the whole thing gets shut down, I think they would choose door number two. I know that sounds crazy, but I think this is almost… They’re on a mission here. This is important to their sense of who they are in the world and in history over at Twitter.

CLAY: What they’ll do, Buck, is they’ll find an investment bank that is going to say, “This offer isn’t high enough, Twitter’s value as a business is more substantial.” The problem with that, Buck, is if that were true, somebody else would be bidding and right now it doesn’t appear that’s occurring.

Maybe it will. If it doesn’t happen that investment bank is gonna be in a tough spot to argue that they are fulfilling their fiduciary duty by not accepting the highest offer and putting the money in the pocket. Here’s the other pressure. Buck, you know this. You invest. Ain’t been a good year for stocks.

BUCK: It’s been rough.

CLAY: (laughs) Yeah, it’s been rough. It’s been rough for the Clay and Buck —

BUCK: I gotta get Car Shield for my electric scooter ’cause I need to make sure I’m prepared for expenses.

CLAY: So all these hedge fund guys and all these equity fund guys who run these businesses, they want to bank the 20% gain that they get if they sell their Twitter stock because not only are they not getting to bank it, they’re going to lose money ’cause the stock price is gonna decline come Monday.

And so if they had the right to choose whether or not to let Elon buy their stock, given how poorly many stocks have done in 2021 already, they get judged by the percentage return they post, Buck. They want to take the money, they want to get out, they want that return. So this is gonna turn into, I think, a real battle royale between capitalists and between communists.