This image from Elon Musk’s Twitter account shows Musk entering Twitter’s headquarters carrying a sink through the lobby area on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2022, in San Francisco.
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This image from Elon Musk’s Twitter account shows Musk entering Twitter’s headquarters carrying a sink through the lobby area on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2022, in San Francisco.
AP
Elon Musk has taken control of Twitter and ousted the company’s CEO, chief financial officer and top lawyer, two people familiar with the deal said Thursday night.
The people would not say whether all the paperwork for the deal, originally valued at $44 billion, had been signed or if the deal had been closed. But they said Musk is in charge of the social media platform and has fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde. Neither person wanted to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the deal.
The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves were widely expected and are almost certainly the first of many major changes Tesla’s CEO will make.
Musk clashed privately with Agrawal in April, just before he decided to make an offer for the company, according to text messages later disclosed in court filings.
Around the same time, he took to Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His tweets were followed by a flurry of abuse against Gadde from other Twitter accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads policy and public safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic slurs in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets flared up once again.
Musk’s changes will be aimed at growing Twitter’s subscriber base and revenue.
In his first major move earlier on Thursday, Musk tried to calm suspicious advertisers on Twitter by saying he is buying the platform to help humanity and doesn’t want it to become a “free hellscape for all”.
The message appeared to be aimed at addressing concerns among advertisers — Twitter’s main source of revenue — that Musk’s plans to promote free speech by curtailing moderated content will open the floodgates to more online toxicity and remove users.
“The reason I bought 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 way without resorting to violence,” Musk wrote. IN an uncharacteristically long message for Tesla’s CEO, who usually projects his thoughts in one-line tweets.
He continued: “There is currently a huge risk that social media will split into far-right and far-left echo chambers that generate more hatred and divide our society.”
Musk has previously expressed distaste for advertising and Twitter’s reliance on it, suggesting more emphasis on other business models, such as paid subscriptions, that would not allow large corporations to dictate policy. how social media works But on Thursday, he assured advertisers that he wants Twitter to be “the most respected advertising platform in the world.”
The memo is a departure from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
But there’s also an understanding that not having content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.
“You don’t want a place where consumers are just bombarded with things they don’t want to hear about and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.
Musk said Twitter should be “warm and welcoming to everyone” and allow users to choose the experience they want to have.
The Friday deadline to close the deal was ordered by the Delaware Court of Chancery in early October. It’s the latest step in a battle that began in April with Musk signing a deal to buy Twitter, then trying to back out of it, prompting Twitter to sue Tesla’s CEO to force him to go ahead with the acquisition. If the two sides don’t meet Friday’s deadline, the next step could be a November trial that could lead to a judge forcing Musk to end the deal.
But Musk has signaled that the deal is on track. He walked into the company’s San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit” and posted on Twitter “Walking into Twitter HQ – let it sink in!”
And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in Twitter shares ahead of the opening bell on Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.
Musk is expected to speak directly with Twitter employees on Friday if the deal is finalized, according to an internal memo cited by several media outlets. Despite internal confusion and low morale over fears of layoffs or a dismantling of the company’s culture and operations, Twitter executives this week have at least outwardly welcomed Musk’s arrival and messaging.
Chief sales executive Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and seemed to approve of his Thursday message to advertisers.
“Our continued commitment to brand safety for advertisers remains unchanged,” Personette tweeted Thursday. “Waiting for the future!”
Musk’s apparent enthusiasm for visiting Twitter’s headquarters this week was in stark contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: that the building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees worked there.
The Washington Post reported last week that Musk told potential investors that he plans to lay off three-quarters of Twitter’s 7,500 employees when he takes over the company. The paper cited unidentified documents and sources familiar with the discussion.
Musk has spent months mocking Twitter’s “spam bots” and making sometimes contradictory statements about Twitter’s problems and how to fix them. But he has shared few concrete details about his plans for the social media platform.
Thursday’s memo to advertisers shows a new emphasis on ad revenue, specifically the need for Twitter to offer more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.
Yildirim said that, unlike Facebook, Twitter has not been good at targeting ads to what users want to see. Musk’s message suggests he wants to fix that, she said.
Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said Musk has good reason to avoid a massive shakeup of Twitter’s ad business because Twitter’s revenue has taken a hit from the weakening economy, months of uncertainty surrounding the proposed takeover of Musk, changing consumer behaviors and the fact that “there are no other sources of income waiting in the wings.”
“Even the slight easing of content moderation on the platform is sure to scare away advertisers, many of whom have already lacked Twitter’s brand safety tools compared to other social platforms,” Enberg said.
