Elon Musk assumes leadership of Twitter and fires the company’s top brass
The sources refused to comment on whether or not all necessary documentation for the $44 billion purchase had been signed or whether or not the deal had closed. Nonetheless, it has been reported that Musk has sacked the social networking platform’s CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and Chief Legal Counsel Vijaya Gadde. Due to the potentially embarrassing nature of the contract, neither party was willing to be named.
The departures occur on Thursday, just hours before a Friday deadline set by a judge in Delaware to complete the agreement. Unless an agreement was made, she threatened to set a trial date.
Although sudden, the significant personnel adjustments had been widely anticipated and are likely only the first of the many dramatic shifts the unpredictable Tesla CEO will undertake.
According to text exchanges that surfaced in court documents, Musk and Agrawal had a private argument in April, right before Musk decided to make a bid for the firm.
At roughly the same time, he tweeted his disapproval of Gadde, the company’s chief counsel. As a result of his tweets, Gadde received a barrage of harassment from other users. Gadde, a Twitter employee for 11 years and the head of public policy and safety, received racist and misogynistic abuse, as well as calls for Musk to terminate her. The nasty tweets resumed on Thursday, when she was let off from her job.
The goals of Musk’s alterations to Twitter are to expand the platform’s user base and boost advertising revenue.
Musk’s first major move on Thursday was an attempt to reassure nervous Twitter advertisers by claiming he was purchasing the service out of altruism and had no intention of turning it into a “free-for-all hellscape.”
This remark looked to be directed at advertisers, Twitter’s main source of revenue, who are worried that Musk’s aspirations to promote free speech by reducing the amount of content moderation will lead to an increase in online toxicity and a subsequent loss of users.
Musk, who often projects his thoughts in one-line tweets, recently published an unusually lengthy letter explaining why he had acquired Twitter.
To continue, 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.”