The presentation slides in this document provide an overview of our study, How Twitter Pushed Stakeholders Under The Bus, which is forthcoming in the Stanford Journal of Law, Business, and Finance. This study focuses on the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. Our analysis indicates that when negotiating the sale of their company to Musk, Twitter’s leaders chose to disregard the interests of the company’s stakeholders and to focus exclusively on the interests of shareholders and the corporate leaders themselves. In particular, Twitter’s corporate leaders elected to push under the bus the interests of company employees, as well as the mission statements and core values to which Twitter had pledged allegiance for years.Our analysis supports the view that the stakeholder rhetoric of corporate leaders, including in corporate mission and purpose statements, is mostly for show and is not matched by their actual decisions and conduct (Bebchuk and Tallarita (2020)). Our findings also suggest that corporate leaders selling their company should not be relied upon to safeguard the interests of stakeholders, contrary to the predictions of the implicit promises and team production theories of Coffee (1986), Shleifer-Summers (1988) and Blair-Stout (1999).The study is part of a larger research project of the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance on stakeholder capitalism and stakeholderism. Other parts of this research project include The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance by Lucian A. Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita, Will Corporations Deliver Value to All Stakeholders? by by Lucian A. Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita, For Whom Corporate Leaders Bargain by Lucian A. Bebchuk, Kobi Kastiel, and Roberto Tallarita, Stakeholder Capitalism in the Time of COVID by Lucian A. Bebchuk, Kobi Kastiel, and Roberto Tallarita, The Perils and Questionable Promise of ESG-Based Compensation by Lucian A. Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita, and Does Enlightened Shareholder Value Add Value? by Lucian A. Bebchuk, Kobi Kastiel, and Roberto Tallarita
