Elon Musk took over Twitter late Thursday and fired company CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, senior legal representative Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett, the Washington Post reported.
Musk, the world’s richest man, acquired the social media giant through a $44 billion purchase. He reportedly had until Friday to complete the deal.
In a video tweet that went viral, Musk appeared at Twitter’s corporate offices Wednesday carrying a sink, implying that employees would need to accept that he was now in charge.
Before completing his purchase of Twitter, Musk had earlier considered backing out of the deal and paying a hefty fine. Throughout the saga, Musk has publicly criticized Twitter’s leadership.
One of Musk’s major criticism was that Twitter’s user base was saturated with fake bots. According to Musk’s team, one-third of Twitter users were either spam or fake accounts, although other techies have cast doubt on this finding.
In a tweet earlier Thursday, Musk outlined his motivations for purchasing Twitter and his vision of how he would like to improve the platform. “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk wrote.
In particular, Musk said he wishes to remake Twitter’s advertising model. “I also very much believe that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you. . . . For this to be true, it is essential to show Twitter users advertising that is as relevant as possible to their needs. Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!”
Musk has considered slashing as many as 75 percent of the workforce due to bloat as well as its “strong left-wing bias.” Twitter employees circulated an open letter this week condemning the plan. "A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users' and customers' trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation," the letter read in a copy obtained by Time.
Musk is set to hold a companywide town hall meeting Friday to update employees on the recent developments.
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