Elon Musk’s $43 billion bid to buy Twitter and take it private is getting deeply personal. And – surprise surprise – the world's richest person turned to the social network to trade barbs with his critics.

Musk vowed to drop the salaries of board members to “$0” should he succeed, retweeting a suggestion that their opposition to his hostile takeover offer is more about keeping their jobs than benefiting shareholders or Twitter. And he asked his 82 million Twitter followers whose decision should it be anyway: shareholders or the board? (The vast majority agreed it should be the former.)

So far, the board's main defense is a so-called poison pill, which it adopted last week. Hoping to explain how – and whether – it will work, I reached out to Tuugi Chuluun, a corporate finance expert at Loyola University Maryland. In her article, she explains why poison pills are usually very effective at preventing a hostile bid.

But “a poison pill isn’t foolproof,” she writes, and there are at least two potential ways around it – and Musk seems to be considering both options as he races to secure financing for his bid.

The Tesla billionaire's fight over Twitter also raises important questions about what makes the social network unique, and how it might change under his control, argues Anjana Susarla, a professor of information systems at Michigan State University.