Andrew
Elon Musk completed his US$44 billion acquisition of Twitter Inc, according to people familiar with the matter, putting the world’s richest man in charge of the struggling social network after six months of public and legal wrangling over the deal.
Departures include Twitter chief executive officer (CEO) Parag Agrawal; Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy and trust; chief financial officer (CFO) Ned Segal, who joined Twitter in 2017; and Sean Edgett, who has been general counsel at Twitter since 2012, according to people familiar with the matter.
Edgett was escorted out of the building, said two of the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is not public.
Shareholders will be paid US$54,20 per share, and Twitter will now operate as a private company.
The completion caps a convoluted saga that began in January with the billionaire’s quiet accumulation of a major stake in the company, his growing exasperation with how it is run and an eventual merger accord that he later spent months trying to unravel.
On October 4, 2022, Musk agreed to proceed on his originally proposed terms, and a Delaware Chancery Court judge gave the two sides until October 28, 2022 to wrap up the deal.
That deadline was met, and now Musk, who is CEO of both Tesla Inc and SpaceX, also controls Twitter, a service he uses often but criticises openly, and that he has promised to change dramatically.
The company’s shares are no longer expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
Musk’s ownership will bring immediate disruption to Twitter’s operations, in part because many of his ideas for how to change the company are at odds with how it has been run for years.
He has said he wants to ensure “free speech” on the social network, which is likely to mean looser content moderation standards and plans to restore some high-profile accounts that were kicked off Twitter for breaking rules, such as former US President Donald Trump’s.
More broadly, Musk’s initiatives threaten to undo years of Twitter’s efforts to reduce bullying and abuse on the platform.
As the deadline neared, Musk began putting his stamp on the company, posting a video of himself walking into the headquarters and changing his profile descriptor on the platform he now owns to “Chief Twit”.
He arranged meetings between Tesla engineers and product leadership at Twitter, and he planned to address the staff on Friday, people familiar with the matter said.
Twitter’s engineers could no longer make changes to code as of noon on Thursday in San Francisco, part of an effort to ensure that nothing about the product changes ahead of the deal closing, the people said.
Twitter employees have been bracing for layoffs since the transaction was announced in April, and Musk floated the idea of cost cuts to banking partners, when he was initially fundraising for the deal.
Some potential investors were told Musk plans to cut 75 percent of Twitter’s workforce, which now numbers about 7 500, and expects to double revenue within three years, a person familiar with the matter said earlier this month.
While visiting Twitter headquarters on Wednesday, Musk told employees that he does not plan to cut 75 percent of the staff when he takes over the company, according to people familiar with the matter.
In June, during an all-hands meeting following his purchase agreement, Musk said Twitter “needs to get healthy”, a reference to trimming costs.
He has also said only “exceptional” employees will be able to work from home and everyone else must come to the office.
San Francisco-based Twitter was one of the first large companies to promise all employees they could work from anywhere “forever”.
Twitter has done some of the work for him.
The company announced a hiring freeze in May, closed or downsized several offices around the world, and cancelled a 2023 company-wide retreat to Disneyland.
Last week, Twitter froze the equity awards accounts for employees in anticipation of the deal closing.
That prompted concerns among workers that the stock awards will not be paid, people familiar with the matter said, and some employees are discussing and researching labour laws to ensure they get the correct type of severance.
It was long clear that Agrawal probably would not remain in charge once Musk took over.
Text messages unveiled during the lawsuit show that the two men had a contentious exchange earlier on in the deal process, and Musk later mocked Agrawal for being on vacation in Hawaii during some of the early negotiations.
Efforts by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to bring them back together after the deal was announced ended poorly.
“At least it became clear that you can’t work together,” Dorsey texted Musk on April 26.
“That was clarifying.”
Gadde, meanwhile, oversaw Twitter’s content policy efforts, which Musk has lambasted.
Twitter’s business, which relies mainly on advertising placed in users’ feeds on its social network, has struggled in the time since Musk publicly entered the chat in April.
In the second quarter, the company reported its first year-over-year sales decline since the height of the pandemic, and Twitter likely experienced a similar slump for the third quarter, though the company has not announced plans to report earnings. — Bloomberg
Online Reporter