Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has finished acquiring Twitter for $44 billion (£38.1 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.
As a self-described “free speech absolutist,” Mr. Elon Musk has criticized Twitter’s moderation practices, so the news likely is 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 Mr. Agrawal and Jack Dorsey, who was Mr. 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.
Ned Segal, the company’s chief financial officer, Mr. Agrawal, and Vijaya Gadde, it’s senior legal and policy executive, are no longer employed by the company.
Following the completion of the transaction, Mr. Agrawal and Mr. Segal were led from Twitter’s San Francisco offices, according to Reuters.
Mr. Agrawal, Mr. Segal, and Ms. 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.
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It is yet unclear if the reported board purge represents the start of company-wide employment layoffs.
A shareholder in both Twitter and Elon Musk’s other company, Tesla, Ross Gerber, president and chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, told the BBC that predictions that 75% of the social media giant’s workforce will lose their jobs were “inaccurate.”
He stated that the number of jobs lost would depend on “how good the personnel is,” but added that the first figure was 50%.
According to Mr. Gerber, “Twitter has a lot of talented employees, especially on the engineering side, and they want to keep as much of that expertise.”
The management side of trimming is really what they’re looking at, according to Mr. Gerber, and they’ve already started with high management. The product managers “and items they have been working on that aren’t going anywhere” will then likely face cuts, he claimed.
The website of the New York Stock Exchange states that trading in the shares of the social media network will cease on Friday.
Mr. Musk claimed that he purchased the social media network in order to benefit humanity and to create “a shared digital town square for civilization.”
Let that sink in! was the caption on a video Mr. Musk posted earlier this week of himself entering Twitter’s San Francisco offices carrying a kitchen sink.
Additionally, he changed his Twitter handle’s name 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 owner of Tesla noted on a recent earnings call.
A long road
Early investments made by Mr. Musk on 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, Mr.Elon 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, Mr. Elon Musk renewed his acquisition intentions for the firm at the beginning of October.
Change Ahead
Twitter has not yet made any comments regarding its new management group, but regardless matter who takes over as its future CEO, it is certain that Mr. Musk will ultimately be in charge of the business.
Early in April, while Mr. Agrawal was a temporary member of Twitter’s board, he split with him.
In private exchanges made public in court documents, Mr. Musk complained that Mr. 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.
The decision to omit former US President Donald Trump has been dubbed “foolish” by Mr. Musk, who also promised to change it.
Following the assault by his supporters on the Capitol building in Washington, which resulted in the deaths of five people, Mr. Trump’s Twitter account was permanently disabled in January 2021. Twitter claimed that it wished to reduce the possibility that his posts may stir up more violence.
Mr. Trump insists he won’t be reactivating his account and would rather use his own platform, Truth Social, to post.
In a post, Mr. Musk stated that “X, the app for everything” is part of his intentions for Twitter.
