EA long takeover saga is over: Elon Musk completed the takeover of Twitter on Thursday. This was reported by several American media unanimously. Accordingly, the CEO of the electric car manufacturer Tesla immediately began to clean up the company. It is said that he immediately fired several top managers, including former CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal. According to the Washington Post, executives were hastily escorted out of Twitter offices.
So Musk immediately started putting his stamp on the company. It is no surprise that he would change the current leadership. He has repeatedly been very critical of Parag Agrawal in the past. It remains unclear for the time being who will lead Twitter in the future. Musk called himself “Chief Twit” on his own Twitter profile on Wednesday, fueling speculation that he might want to become CEO himself. Of course, he already runs two other companies, Tesla and the aerospace specialist SpaceX.
Musk faced a deadline of Friday to finalize the transaction with Twitter. The acquisition was agreed in April, but Musk has since attempted to terminate the deal. Twitter sued him, and everything appeared to be headed for a court case until a few weeks ago, when Musk abruptly changed his mind and said he wanted to buy Twitter for the originally agreed price of $44 billion. The judge in the lawsuit then set a deadline of October 28 to finalize the acquisition.
After that, there were still doubts as to whether Musk really meant it, but in the past few days everything seemed to be pointing towards the completion of the acquisition. Musk came to Twitter’s headquarters on Wednesday and spoke to employees. After many critical tones in the past, he was also forgiving and tweeted that he had “met a lot of cool people” in the company. Of course, that doesn’t seem to have stopped him from immediately cleaning up the top management.
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Musk had previously described his new role as owner as a fact on Twitter on Thursday. He published a lengthy post on “why I bought Twitter” and addressed it to “dear advertisers.” He said he didn’t do it because he wanted to make more money or because it was easy. He did it “to help humanity that I love”. It is “important for the future of civilization” to have a digital public space where many different beliefs can be debated.
Musk has often described the Twitter takeover in recent months as some kind of campaign for free speech, and has hinted that user guidelines would be relaxed under him. He has also said he would lift the current Twitter ban on former US President Donald Trump. This has raised concerns that Twitter may become a more extreme platform under him and advertisers may turn away. His letter on Thursday was apparently aimed at reassuring advertisers. He said Twitter can’t “become a hell where anything goes.” Twitter has the ambition to become “the most respected advertising platform in the world”.
