The messy Elon Musk-Twitter saga has finally come to a close.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has finally taken over Twitter after a tumultuous acquisition process that all started back in April. What began as a simple buyout has become into a full-blown media spectacle, and there was a point in time when the 51-year-old billionaire entrepreneur expressed his desire to back out of the deal due to the company failing to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts. Musk, however, ultimately decided to proceed with the deal after the social media platform took matters to court.
Elon Musk bought all of Twitter’s stock for $54.30 each, paying a total of $44 billion for complete ownership of the company.
His first order of business – cleaning house.
The new Twitter owner has already kicked out several top executives from the social media giant, according to a Friday report from Reuters.
Those axed from Musk’s Twitter takeover include the company’s CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadded.
According to the report, Musk had previously accused the executives of “misleading him and Twitter investors over the number of fake accounts on the social media platform.” The moment the deal was finalized, Agrawal and Segal were escorted out of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters office on Thursday evening.
On a video tweet Thursday, October 27, Musk was seen carrying a sink into Twitter HQ, saying “Let that sink in.” People then noticed he changed his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit”.
The next day, Musk tweeted, “The bird is freed.”
The New York Stock Exchange filed to delist Twitter stock on Friday. Musk is making the company private, and shareholders will get $54.20 per share.
On Saturday, October 29, he then wrote:
“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.
To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies.”
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