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Elon Musk fired top executives of social media company Twitter as soon as he completed the $US44 billion ($A68 billion) acquisition deal.
The tech billionaire had claimed that they had misled him on the quantity of spam accounts present on the network.
People familiar with the situation claim that Musk fired Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and head of law and policy Vijaya Gadde.
When the sale was finalized, Agrawal and Segal were present at Twitter’s San Francisco offices and were led out, the sources continued.
Requests for comment from Twitter, Musk, and the executives did not receive an instant response.
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The CEO of electric car maker Tesla Inc has said he wants to “defeat” spam bots on Twitter, make the algorithms that determine how content is presented to its users publicly available, and prevent the platf orm from becoming an echo chamber for hate and division, even as he limits censorship.
Yet Musk has not offered details on how he will achieve all this and who will run the company. He has said he plans to cut jobs, leaving Twitter’s approximately 7500 employees fretting about their future. He also said on Thursday he did not buy Twitter to make more money but “to try to help humanity, whom I love”.
The $US44 billion ($A68 billion) acquisition is the culmination of a remarkable saga, full of twists and turns, that sowed doubt over whether Musk would complete the deal. It began on April 4, when Musk disclosed a 9.2 per cent stake in the San Francisco company, making him its largest shareholder.
The world’s richest person then agreed to join Twitter’s board, only to baulk at the last minute and offer to buy the company instead for $US54.20 ($A83.89) per share, an offer that Twitter was unsure whether to interpret as another of Musk’s cannabis jokes.
Musk’s offer was real, and over the course of just one weekend later in April, the two sides reached a deal at the price he suggested. This happened without Musk carrying out any due diligence on the company’s confidential information, as is customary in an acquisition.
In the weeks that followed, Musk had second thoughts. He complained publicly that he believed Twitter’s spam accounts were significantly higher than Twitter’s estimate, published in regulatory filings, of less than 5 per cent of its monetisable daily active users. His lawyers then accused Twitter of not complying with his requests for information on the subject.
The acrimony resulted in Musk giving notice to Twitter on July 8 that he was terminating their deal on the grounds that Twitter misled him on the bots and did not cooperate with him. Four days later, Twitter sued Musk in Delaware, where the company is incorporated, to force him to complete the deal.
By then, shares of social media companies and the broader stock market had plunged on concerns that the Fed eral Reserve’s interest rate hikes, as it seeks to fight inflation, will push the US economy into recession. Twitter accused Musk of buyer’s remorse, arguing he wanted to get out of the deal because he thought he overpaid.
Musk walked into Twitter’s headquarters on Wednesday with a big grin and carrying a porcelain sink, subsequently tweeting “let that sink in.” He changed his description in his Twitter profile to Chief Twit.
He also tried to calm fears among employees that major layoffs are coming and assured advertisers that his past criticism of Twitter’s content moderation rules would not harm its appeal.
“Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Musk said in an open letter to advertisers on Thursday.
Musk said in May he would reverse the ban on Donald Trump, who was removed after the attack on the US Capitol, although the former president said he won’t return to the platform. He instead launched his own social media app, Truth Social.
With AAP. (Content has been tweaked for length and style.)
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.
