Liam Denning, Columnist

Elon Musk Isn’t Joining Twitter. Twitter Has Joined Him.

The company will now have to constantly explain his influence until he moves on to something else.

April 11, 2022 at 2:07 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Not joining the Twitter board.
Photographer: Patrick Pleul/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

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Twitter Inc. is discovering that the only thing worse than having Elon Musk on your board is not having Elon Musk on your board. This maxim also works as a logical palindrome — on/off or off/on, Twitter’s left in the same limbo. Which is why, after it emerged on Sunday that Musk had rejected the offer of a board seat, CEO Parag Agrawal issued (and tweeted) a plaintive non-explanation of what had happened, tucking in at the end this Hail Mary:

“Good luck with that” doesn’t begin to cover it. Twitter is noise; a ready contender for being the apotheosis of the stuff. What has gone wrong in the past week is that its arch-noisemaker broke through the fourth wall separating the bedlam from the boardroom. Or, rather, he hammered loudly on that wall and was then invited in, only to say no.