Twitter’s newest major investor wants to oust CEO Jack Dorsey

Enlarge / Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), on November 12, 2018 in New Delhi, India. (credit: Amal KS | Hindustan Times | Getty Images)

A massive private equity firm has taken on a large stake in Twitter with a clear goal reportedly in mind: kicking company CEO Jack Dorsey to the curb.

Bloomberg late on Friday was the first to report that Elliott Management Corp. acquired a "sizable" amount of Twitter shares in order to push for changes in the firm.

Elliott is known far and wide in the money world as an activist investor firm. Basically, that means it buys large stakes in businesses with the intent of pushing changes through rather than just acquiring shares and sitting on them. (Carl Icahn is likely the best-known activist investor.) Unlike many other firms, Twitter only issues one class of stock, which allows an investment firm like Elliott to more easily build up a significant volume of voting shares. That structure is significantly different from, for example, Facebook, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg retains an enormous amount of voting power, as compared to the specific number of company shares he holds.

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