Hours after completing his acquisition of Twitter for a whopping USD 44 billion and starting off as the social media giant’s new owner by firing its top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, billionaire Elon Musk, now the ‘Chief Twit’, tweeted on Friday: “Let the good times roll”.
”Spoiler Alert. Let the good times roll,” Musk, 51, tweeted early Friday morning after ending Thursday night with his acquisition of Twitter.
Earlier today, Musk had tweeted: ‘The bird is freed’, after completing the takeover of Twitter and firing four top executives, including Agrawal, legal executive Vijaya Gadde, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and General Counsel Sean Edgett.
”I will be digging in more today,” Musk said in reply to a tweet by a user called ‘Catturd’ who tweeted that he will be tweeting a message ”every day to see if anything changes. As of now, I’m still Shadowbanned, ghostbanned, searchbanned, and Twitter removed 1200 followers today – as usual. Nothing has changed – I’ll report again tomorrow.”
”At least one of the executives who was fired was escorted out of Twitter’s office,” a report in the New York Times claimed.
Musk, a self-styled ”free speech absolutist”, has been critical of Twitter’s management and its moderation policies. After initially agreeing to buy the company in April, Musk spent months attempting to get out of the deal, first citing concerns about the number of bots on the platform and later allegations raised by a company whistleblower. The deal’s closing removes a cloud of uncertainty that has hung over Twitter’s business, employees and shareholders for much of the year, the CNN commented.
Agrawal, 38, was appointed Twitter CEO in November last year after the social media site’s co-founder Jack Dorsey had stepped down. An IIT Bombay and Stanford alumnus, Agrawal had joined Twitter over a decade ago when there were fewer than 1,000 employees at the company.
As the Twitter account of former US President Donald Trump was permanently suspended in January last year, Hyderabad-born Gadde was at the forefront of this dramatic decision undertaken within days of the attempted insurrection by pro-Trump supporters at the US Capitol.
Musk arrived at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco on Wednesday and had been meeting with engineers and advertising executives.
Musk also updated his Twitter description to “Chief Twit.” He has promised to transform Twitter by loosening the service’s content moderation rules, making its algorithm more transparent and nurturing subscription businesses, as well as laying off employees. In April, Twitter accepted Musk’s proposal to buy the social media service and take it private.
However, Musk soon began sowing doubt about his intentions to follow through with the agreement, alleging that the company failed to adequately disclose the number of spam and fake accounts on the service.
When Musk said he was terminating the deal, Twitter sued the billionaire, alleging he “refuses to honour his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.” Earlier in October, Musk said he wanted to pursue his acquisition of Twitter at the original price of USD 54.20 a share if the social messaging service dropped its litigation.
