Elon Musk closes Twitter deal, fires top executives

Sources: The New York Times, CNBC, Mint

USA, Oct 29: On Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk finally took over Twitter in a $44 billion deal and consequently fired Twitter’s top executives including former CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal. Starting Wednesday, Musk visited the San Francisco headquarters to meet employees. On the following day, he posted a video of himself carrying a sink inside the headquarters on Twitter captioned: “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” He also updated his Twitter description to ‘Chief Twit’.

Source: Fox Business News. Caption: Musk is new Twitter Chief, what’s next for Twitter?

The eccentric billionaire’s move comes after a long journey, with the first offering to buy Twitter in April this year. When Twitter decided to sell, Musk withdrew, alleging that the company could not produce the number of bots and fake accounts on its platform. This led to Twitter suing Musk in court for refusing to honour their agreement and obligations to stakeholders. Eventually, A Delaware Chancery Court judge ruled that Musk had until Oct. 28 to cement the Twitter deal or go to trial. And this got Twitter its new Chief.

Musk’s interest in acquiring Twitter is to make the platform an advocate of ‘free speech’. In his own words; “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” he said. “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far-right wing and far left-wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.” He also plans on introducing new features, making its algorithms open-source, and combating bots and fake accounts.

Some of these features are already underway, as engineers worked on them immediately after the Musk takeover as per his request.

The tension in the headquarters is high as Twitter houses about 7,500 employees, and the scale of the layoffs is uncertain. Yet there are some who wish to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, according to sources that would not like to be revealed.