Twitter board members' salary will be $0 if my bid succeeds: Elon Musk

Twitter's largest individual shareholder Elon Musk on Monday said that the microblogging platform board's salary will be $0 if his offer to buy 100% of the company succeeds.

The move, according to Musk, will cut the company's costs by around $3 million per year.

This comes at a time when Twitter's board has adopted a "poison pill" – a shareholder rights plan -- to protect itself from Musk's takeover bid. The move gives existing shareholders an option to buy more stock at a lower price.

In a letter to Bret Taylor, chairman of the board at Twitter, Musk had last week offered to buy 100% of Twitter for $43 billion or $54.20 per share in cash, a 38% premium over the day before Musk's investment was publicly announced.

"My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder," the Tesla founder had said.

The company should be private to go through the changes that need to be made, Musk wrote in the letter. "After the past several days of thinking this over, I have decided I want to acquire the company and take it private."

While Musk has been critical of censorship by Twitter, he believes in the company’s potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe.

"I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form," the world's richest person wrote in his letter.

Musk also cautioned that if the deal doesn't go through, he would need to reconsider his position as a shareholder. "If the deal doesn't work, given that I don't have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder. This is not a threat, it's simply not a good investment without the changes that need to be made. And those changes won't happen without taking the company private," he said.

The Tesla chief said that the social media company's board hardly owns any shares. "Wow, with Jack departing, the Twitter board collectively owns almost no shares! Objectively, their economic interests are simply not aligned with shareholders," he tweeted.

Meanwhile, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has also called out the microblogging platform's board, saying that it's consistently been the dysfunction of the company. Dorsey, who left as chief executive in November and remains a board member until next month, agreed with venture capitalist Gary Tan's statement that a badly run board "can literally make a billion dollars in value disappear."