Done Deal! Internet Shaken As Elon Musk Is Officially The Owner Of Twitter

Elon Musk is officially the owner of the social media giant Twitter.

The deal was done on Thursday and the Tesla, Space X, Starlink and now Twitter CEO immediately fired the CEO and CFO of the company, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Mr. Musk fired Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal after the deal closed, the people said. Spokespeople for Twitter didn’t comment.

It wasn’t immediately clear who would step into those top positions. CNBC previously reported the firings.

Mr. Musk also fired Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top legal and policy executive, and Sean Edgett, general counsel.

There were signs that the deal was coming close to being done this week. 

In pursuit of Twitter took a decidedly positive turn earlier this month when reports surfaced that he would complete the $44 billion deal.

Or a negative turn, depending upon a person’s perspective. Either way, the SpaceX and Tesla founder gave off another huge clue on Tuesday that the deal was proceeding, and he did so in the most Musk of ways.

He posted a video clip of himself walking into Twitter headquarters in San Francisco carrying a sink, adding: “Entering Twitter HQ – Let that sink in!”

In addition, Musk changed his Twitter bio to read “Chief Twit.” Later, he tweeted, “Meeting a lot of cool people at Twitter today.”

The actions come as Musk faces a 5 p.m. deadline on Friday to either complete the deal, or litigation against him to force him to proceed with it will relaunch in Delaware.

All said, Musk is prepared to make major changes to the workforce at Twitter when he officially owns the company.

For instance, he plans to cut the workforce by “nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000, the Washington Post reported. But even if Musk does not complete his purchase of Twitter the report said that the current owners plan to cut the workforce by 25 percent:

The extent of the cuts, which have not been previously reported, helps explain why Twitter officials were eager to sell to Musk: Musk’s $44 billion bid, though hostile, is a golden ticket for the struggling company — potentially helping its leadership avoid painful announcements that would have demoralized the staff and possibly crippled the service’s ability to combat misinformation, hate speech and spam.

The impact of such layoffs would likely be immediately felt by millions of users, said Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics and now CEO of the content-moderation start-up Surge AI. He said that while he believed Twitter was overstaffed, the cuts Musk proposed were “unimaginable” and would put Twitter’s users at risk of hacks and exposure to offensive material such as child pornography.

 “It would be a cascading effect,” the data scientist said. “where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up, and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves.”

“The easy part for Musk was buying Twitter and the hard part is fixing it,” financial analyst Dan Ives said. “It will be a herculean challenge to turn this around.”

“He’s got to be able to show if he makes those cuts, what happens next?” corporate governance expert Nell Minow said. “What’s he gonna replace it with, AI?”

Meanwhile, Twitter quietly made a move that indicates the company is confident Musk’s bid to buy the platform will go through.

 “Twitter Inc. froze the equity awards accounts for employees on Monday as the deadline to seal a deal with Elon Musk approaches,” Bloomberg Law reported Oct. 18. “The social media company updated its employee FAQ page this week to alert staff that they won’t be able to access or trade shares from the Equity Award Center. The page said the change was done ‘in anticipation of the closing of the pending acquisition of Twitter by an entity controlled by Elon Musk,’ according to two people familiar with the change. This freeze allows Schwab to perform the final reconciliation of employee accounts.”

Earlier, Conservative Brief reported that federal agencies were investigating Musk over his bid to purchase the social media platform, according to legal filings by attorneys representing the company.

According to reports, it isn’t clear what federal authorities are investigating. But one report also noted that Twitter is seeking documents related to the probes, though it isn’t clear what is being sought, specifically. The request for documents was filed after Musk said he would buy the platform, noted the Washington Examiner.

“Elon Musk is presently under investigation by federal authorities for his conduct in connection with the acquisition of Twitter,” Twitter’s legal team said in an Oct. 6 legal filing with a Delaware court, according to Bloomberg. In addition, Twitter lawyers asked that Musk’s team also provide the same documents because they “bear upon key issues in this litigation.