Elliott Management buys more Twitter stock after earnings rout

Brian Sozzi
·Executive Editor
·2 min read
4

Elliott Management is staying big believers in Twitter (TWTR) after a mixed first quarter earnings report sent shares down 15% on Friday.

The well-known activist firm is back in the market Tuesday buying more of Twitter's stock, a source familiar with the matter tells Yahoo Finance. The amount of the purchases could not be learned.

Elliott — which disclosed a stake in Twitter last year and pushed for a shake-up of the social media giant that ultimately led to key partner Jesse Cohn joining the board — is fresh off buying $200 million of the company's stock on Friday's steep sell-off.

The current size of Elliott's stake could not be determined.

Elliott isn't the only one buying Twitter's stock on a pullback. Widely followed tech investor Cathie Wood at Ark Investments reportedly scooped up $71 million in Twitter's stock on Friday's rout.

FILE - In this Feb. 8, 2018, file photo, the logo for Twitter is displayed above a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Twitter reports financial results Tuesday, April 23, 2019. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
FILE - In this Feb. 8, 2018, file photo, the logo for Twitter is displayed above a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Twitter reports financial results Tuesday, April 23, 2019. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Despite Twitter's first quarter falling short versus Wall Street estimates for user growth — and lagging that of rivals Snap and Facebook in this department — company executives remain upbeat. Twitter CFO Ned Segal said on Yahoo Finance Live the company is still aiming to double sales to $7.5 billion by 2023, a goal outlined at an investor day in late February of this year.

"There is no change to our goals for 2023. We don't expect a straight line in terms of how we get there, partly because there is this big group [of users] that joined us last year around the start of COVID-19," Segal explained.

Segal added, "We expect large double digit growth in 2Q, 3Q and 4Q with a low point in 2Q. When we step back and look at our cadence, all the things we are doing to make Twitter better for the people that come to it every day, the top of the funnel continues to be healthy in terms of people who Twitter who haven't been on it for a month or more. We feel really good about the path we are on right now."

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

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