Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former CEO, has resigned from the company’s board of directors

During the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday, Twitter Inc. director Egon Durban, the co-Chief Executive Officer of private equity firm Silver Lake, did not receive enough votes to be re-elected to the board.
Durban’s re-election had been recommended against by Institutional Shareholders Services Inc., an advisory group because he sat on the boards of “more than five publicly-traded businesses.”

Despite failing to earn a majority of shareholder votes, Durban may still be a Twitter director, according to Twitter’s proxy statement. Before the vote, the corporation requires board nominees to submit an “irrevocable resignation,” which would take effect if the person failed to earn shareholder approval and the board accepted the resignation. According to the proxy statement, the board has the power to reject the resignation and keep the nominee on as a director.

A Twitter representative said, “Egon Durban has tendered his resignation to the board.” “The Board’s Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee will evaluate whether to recommend that the Board accept Mr. Durban’s resignation as soon as possible and will give an update in due course,” says the statement.

Former CEO Jack Dorsey did not run for re-election on Wednesday, and he is no longer a board member, effectively ending his formal association with the social network he co-founded in 2006. He has served on the board of directors since 2007 and most recently served as the CEO of Twitter from mid-2015 until his resignation last year.

It’s hardly surprising that Dorsey didn’t run for re-election to the board; he announced in November that he would step down as CEO and leave the board when his tenure expired. However, Dorsey’s departure marks the first time in Twitter’s history that none of the company’s co-founders is still employed or on the board of directors.

Twitter shareholders voted on a variety of items on Wednesday, but none of them included the company’s greatest chance: a potential takeover by billionaire Elon Musk. In late April, the board of directors of Twitter accepted Musk’s plan to take the firm private for $44 billion. The shareholder vote on whether or not to approve the purchase will be held at a later date to be determined.

Musk, the world’s richest man, has promised major changes at Twitter if he takes the firm private, and the present board isn’t anticipated to continue in place. Robert Zoellick, the former president of the World Bank and a Twitter director since 2018, also declined to run for re-election on Wednesday.

Patrick Pichette, the former finance chief of Google, was re-elected to the Twitter board. The remaining seven director positions on Twitter were not up for renewal this year.

Shareholders rejected a plan that would have declassified the company’s board of directors and compelled members to run for re-election every year. When board members are chosen, they are given three-year terms, which makes it difficult for an outside activist investor to come in and push board changes in a short amount of time.