This time, it’s legitimate. Elon Musk has completed the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter after months of legal turmoil, offensive memes, and will-they-won’t-they mayhem to rival your favorite rom-com. In the process of taking Twitter private and removing a number of key executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, Musk finalized the deal on Thursday night.
Virtual Meeting with Musk
Ned Segal, the CFO, Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy, and trust, and Sean Edgett, the general counsel, are said to have been fired by Elon Musk on Thursday. Even if it’s still a hasty and abrupt decision for day one, Agrawal’s appointment seemed inevitable given his well-known conflicts and unsuccessful virtual meeting with Musk.
It’s also not surprising that Gadde, despite being a respected individual within the organization, was among the first to go. Because of her involvement in Twitter’s policy decision-making, Musk previously singled out the top executive and accused her of “left-wing prejudice,” which sparked a racial hate campaign and harassment of her.
The path toward making Twitter private has not been easy. Early in April, when he paid $3 billion for 9.2% of Twitter, Musk first started toying with the idea of owning the social media platform. He didn’t, however, stop there. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX announced his intention to purchase Twitter for $44 billion less than ten fatal days later. Twitter agreed, but Musk quickly changed his mind and tried everything to back out of the agreement, bringing the parties before the Delaware Court of Chancery. Musk declared that he will proceed after going through some uncomfortable pre-trial discovery and faced an impending deadline for his deposition.
Why Musk backtracked
It’s unclear why Musk changed his mind and decided to actually purchase Twitter. It’s probable that Musk and his attorneys interpreted hints about their upcoming trial, which was initially schedule to start on October 17. Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk over the summer to pressure the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX to complete the deal. In response, Musk countersued Twitter, alleging falsely that the business misled him about the amount of automated accounts on the network, which is crucial for brands and marketers seeking human eyeballs on their paid advertisements.
Judge Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Chancery Court made it clear that she wasn’t there to amuse Musk’s irrational antics as the legal spat between Musk and Twitter heated up. Judge McCormick only agreed if Musk could complete the transaction by Friday, October 28. This was the deadline Musk set when he declare in early October that he would buy Twitter if he could stop the approaching trial. We would all be facing a new Musk/Twitter trial date scheduled for November if he had missed the deadline.
Removing Spam and Fake bots
It’s also unclear where Musk intends to take Twitter on this first day when Elon Musk is the sole owner of the social media site. As one of the most followed users on the platform, the erratic and frequently contradictory billionaire has previously promised to restore the former president Trump’s account, purge the site of all automated bots, which personally annoy him (good luck), and praised Twitter’s potential as a neutral ground square and a counterbalance to his complaints about traditional media outlets, which occasionally do not report on his antics favorably.
In truth, Twitter is a struggling but immensely well-known platform where hardcore porn and heads of state frequently mix. After a protracted period of stagnation, Twitter has now started to implement adjustments to its goods and policies. Although it is unclear whether Musk will go back in time and complete some of those experiments while claiming to reinvent the wheel (monetizing creators is undoubtedly an original idea! ), it is difficult to see how he can achieve any of his objectives while potentially decimating the company’s workforce. Musk’s denial of rumours that he intends to lay off 75% of Twitter’s employees is anything but reassuring given that thousands of employees would still lose their jobs even if he only fired a third or half of the workforce.
Elon Musk Explains Reason for Buying Twitter
In his open letter to advertisers, he also described a vision for a social platform that would allow for the participation of all sides in debates in a “healthy manner,” and he expressed the hope that Twitter could facilitate this.
He said that,
“I bought Twitter because I believe it is crucial for society to have a shared digital town square where a variety of viewpoints can be discuss civilly and without using force.
Currently, there is a significant risk that social media will fragment into far-right and far-left echo chambers that spread more hate and split our society.
Many traditional media outlets have fuel and catered to those polarized extremes in their continuous search of clicks because they think that will make them money, but by doing so, the chance for dialogue is gone.
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