Elon Musk officially takes over Twitter; fires top executives

Elon Musk has finally officially taken over Twitter after months of drama by paying $54.20 per share, equal to about $44 billion.

He had confirmed in early October that he was going ahead with the purchase in a letter by Elon Musk and his representatives.

He celebrated this with a tweet on his Twitter page saying “the bird is freed”. He has also changed his Twitter bio to read “Chief Twit”

Bloomberg reports that most of the top executives have been let go. The executives include Twitter Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal; Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy and trust; Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, who joined Twitter in 2017; and Sean Edgett, who has been general counsel at Twitter since 2012, according to people familiar with the matter.

He created a scene on Wednesday entering the Twitter Headquarters carrying a bathroom sink and tweeting “Entering Twitter HQ – Let that sink in!”

With this change in leadership, Twitter will now operate as a private company and will no longer trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

He met with Twitter employees and arranged meetings between Tesla engineers and product leadership at Twitter. He also plans to address the staff on Friday.

This now means Elon Musk is now in charge of 3 companies – Tesla Inc., SpaceX and Twitter. It is not immediately clear if he will officially name himself the CEO or appoint someone else. It is however likely he will personally run things at the social media company.

He has talked about some of the changes he will likely make in the company once he takes over. It is rumoured that he will likely cut 75% of the staff but he told employees that he would not cut 75% of the staff when he takes over. Maybe it might not be up to 75%.

He also intends to scrap lifelong bans for users. This automatically means that President Donald Trump’s ban would be revoked. He mentioned the possibility of subscription product to augment the revenue of the company.

Another pet peeve of his that we know he would tackle is the presence of spam bots on Twitter. He would focus on reducing this to the barest minimum or eliminating them altogether. He also wants to make the algorithms that determine how content is presented to its users available.

We are sure that Twitter is in for a whirlwind ride and one should not be surprised by anything outlandish from the company with the antecedence of the new man at the helm of affairs.