Elon Musk officially became Twitter’s owner late on Thursday as his $44 billion deal to take over the firm closed. Musk promptly fired top executives at the company, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CEO Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, the “trust and safety” lead notorious for her fanatical left-wing censorship campaign.
The Washington Post reports that on Thursday, Elon Musk arrived at Twitter offices to officially confirm his company takeover after the $44 billion purchase deal closed. Musk had previously stated plans to cut Twitter’s staff of approximately 7,500 employees to just over 2,000.
Musk appeared to decide to start at the top of the company and promptly fired top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust, and safety. The company’s general counsel, Sean Edgett, was also let ago according to sources and all were promptly escorted out of the company’s offices in San Francisco.
This would appear to confirm Musk’s previous claims that he planned to take Twitter in an entirely new direction and was unhappy with current management, which Musk has publicly criticized on multiple occasions. Musk has taken issue with the former executives’ decisions relating to content moderation and product direction, as well as criticizing moves such as the banning of former President Donald Trump.
However, Musk clarified on Twitter on Thursday: “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!”
This would appear to mean that Musk’s Twitter will have some form of code of conduct or acceptable behavior that will differ from the current one implemented across the platform. Musk later tweeted “the bird is freed.”
Musk plans to hold a companywide town hall today. It is also expected that Twitter will become private today and will dissolve its current board of directors and end public trading of its stock.
Musk is now head of one of the most powerful communication platforms in the world just days before a major election in the United States. Many will be watching closely to see how Musk handles the coming challenges that an election may cause in the midst of the corporate transition, already a chaotic event.
Read more at the Washington Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan