..and he fired numerous high ranking Twitter officials as the “Musk” era starts today. What’s next for the social media site?
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has finished acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, according to US media and a company investor. He appeared to be alluding to the sale finishing when he tweeted “the bird is freed.”
According to reports, several senior employees, including the boss, Parag Agrawal, have been let go.
It ends a drama in which Twitter went to court to get the multi-billionaire comply with the terms of a takeover agreement that he had attempted to elude. Twitter however, have not officially honored the transfer of ownership.
As a self-described “free speech absolutist,” Musk has criticized Twitter’s moderation practices, so the news likely be met with varied reactions from users and staff members. The resignation of Mr. Agrawal as CEO will be widely celebrated on the right of US politics. They see Agrawal and Jack Dorsey, who was Agrawal’s predecessor, as “liberals” who are restricting free expression.
Additionally, they believe that Twitter has blocked conservative viewpoints while under their leadership, a claim that Twitter has refuted. According to US media sources, Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, and the company’s top legal and policy executive, Vijaya Gadde, are no longer employed by the corporation.
Agrawal, Segal, and Gadde were praised by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone for their “collective contribution” to the company. Bret Taylor, who had been the chairman of Twitter since last November, updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect his resignation from the position.
The website of the New York Stock Exchange states that trading in the shares of the social media network will cease on Friday. Musk claimed that he purchased the social media network in order to benefit humanity and to create “a shared digital town square for civilization.”
via Elon Musk’s Twitter
“Let that sink in!”
It was the caption on a video Elon posted earlier this week of himself entering Twitter’s San Francisco offices carrying a kitchen sink. He also altered the name of his Twitter account to “Chief Twit.”
Twitter is “an asset that has just sort of languished for a long time, but has amazing potential, although obviously myself and the other investors are overpaying for Twitter right now,” the founder of Tesla noted on a recent earnings call.
Early investments made by Elon in Twitter at first went unnoticed by the public. He started buying shares on a regular basis in January, and by the middle of March, he had amassed a 5% ownership holding in the company. He was identified as Twitter’s top stakeholder in April, and by the end of the month, a deal to acquire the business for $44 billion had been made.
He declared he will eliminate spam accounts while maintaining the platform’s status as a place for free discourse. But by mid-May, Musk, a frequent Twitter user, had started to have second thoughts about the purchase, expressing worries that there were more phony accounts on the site than Twitter had indicated.
He declared he was done with buying the business in July. However, Twitter asserted that the billionaire was legally bound by the transaction and ultimately filed a lawsuit to enforce the agreement.
On the condition that legal procedures be suspended, Musk renewed his acquisition intentions for the firm at the beginning of October.
In private exchanges made public in court documents, Musk complained that Agrawal didn’t know how to fix the issues with the social network platform. It appears that many individuals who have been barred from the site due to hate speech or misinformation may be invited back now that Mr. Musk is in charge.
Former US President Donald Trump’s Twitter ban has not been lifted, a decision that Elon Musk earlier called “foolish” and promised to overturn. Trump has insisted, though, that he won’t be reactivating his account and would rather to post on his own site, Truth Social.
In a post, Musk stated that “X, the app for everything” is part of his intentions for Twitter.
Some people speculate that this might be similar to the wildly popular Chinese app WeChat, a sort of “super app” that combines several services like texting, social media, payments, and food ordering.
