His era therefore began with layoffs in the executive suite of the social media company. On Thursday, the previous company boss Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal were fired, among others, the broadcaster CNBC and the “Wall Street Journal” reported on Friday night.
The top manager responsible for the fight against hate speech and false information Vijaya Gadde was among the dismissed, it said.
Musk had repeatedly criticized Agrawal and the Twitter leadership in recent months. Agrawal and Segal were at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters when the deal was finalized and were escorted out, according to people familiar with the matter.
Cryptic tweet
Musk, in his usual fashion, hints at the completion of the Twitter acquisition with a somewhat cryptic tweet. “The bird is free,” Musk wrote on Friday night on the short message service without further details. The Twitter logo is a blue bird – and Musk had always emphasized that he wanted to free the platform from restrictions on freedom of expression that were too strong in his view. Critics fear he could encourage hate speech and hate speech that Twitter’s teams have been fighting for years.
The official completion of the acquisition was expected by Friday at the latest. Then a deadline set by the court expires, after which the month-long dispute between Musk and Twitter over the approximately $ 44 billion deal would come to a trial. A judge gave Musk and Twitter until 5:00 p.m. EST on Friday to finally settle the takeover after months of back and forth.
Musk calls himself “Chief Twit”
Musk had engineered the takeover himself, but then tried to get out of the deal, citing allegedly false information about the number of fake accounts on Twitter. Twitter took him to court – and shortly before the trial in the state of Delaware, Musk agreed to buy Twitter at the originally agreed price of $54.20 per share. The fact that he made the cessation of the court case a condition caused uncertainty until the end.
It has been clear for days that Musk has come to terms with his new role as Twitter owner. He showed up at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco on Wednesday and described himself as “Chief Twit” on his Twitter profile.
According to US media, he wants to introduce himself to the employees there on a larger scale on Friday. This should not be an easy performance for him after Musk had publicly criticized the company and its management for months and recent reports of large job cuts caused uncertainty among employees. He is said to have rejected information that he wanted to throw out three quarters of the employees at headquarters this week.
Source: Nachrichten
