Elon Musk now owns Twitter

Reviews surfaced earlier on Thursday that a number of members of Twitter’s senior management had been summarily fired, together with CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and head of authorized Vijaya Gadde. Sources acquainted with the matter instructed the Wall Avenue Journal that Musk had accomplished the deal on Thursday, someday earlier than a court docket imposed deadline.

The abrupt purging of high executives and the shortage of any official replace from Twitter concerning the standing of the acquisition appeared to carry to an finish, in becoming style, one of the weird offers in company historical past.

Musk agreed to purchase the social networking website in April for $54.20 per share, however modified his thoughts and sought to again out of the deal a few months later because the markets suffered a pointy decline.

Musk argued that Twitter had misinformed him concerning the quantity of faux “bot” customers on the platform, claiming with out proof that the variety of bots was considerably increased than Twitter’s 5% estimate. Twitter then sued Musk in Delaware Chancery Courtroom to power him to shut the deal.

All through the method Musk taunted Twitter executives, firing off tweets accusing them of political bias and poor administration. At one level Musk steered turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters right into a homeless shelter. On one other event he responded to CEO Agrawal with a poop emoji.

With roughly 240 million every day customers, Twitter is without doubt one of the most influential social media providers, utilized by politicians, celebrities, activists, and enterprise moguls to announce information, share info and make jokes.

The sale to Musk, the world’s richest particular person and the CEO of two different firms — electrical automotive maker Tesla and aerospace firm SpaceX — signifies that Twitter will turn into a privately held firm owned by Musk.

Musk’s possession of Twitter has raised considerations inside and outdoors the corporate concerning his plans. The 51-year-old has stated he intends to loosen Twitter’s guidelines about acceptable speech on the service, together with doubtlessly overturning the lifetime ban on former president Donald Trump, and that he meant to layoff 75% of the corporate’s workers.

In a message to Twitter advertisers that Musk tweeted earlier on Thursday, he wrote that he was shopping for Twitter “as a result of it is very important the way forward for civilization to have a typical digital city sq., the place a variety of wholesome beliefs could be debated in a wholesome method, with out resorting to violence.”

“Twitter clearly can not turn into a free-for-all hellscape, the place something could be stated with no penalties!” Musk wrote.

Twitter representatives didn’t return requests for touch upon the standing of the acquisition.