Elon Musk completes Twitter takeover

After months of “legal back-and-forth”, Elon Musk has taken control of Twitter and immediately fired several top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal, said The Guardian.

Musk has also sacked chief financial officer Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, according to reports. It is believed that Agrawal and Segal were in Twitter’s San Francisco HQ when the deal closed and were escorted out of the building. Insider reported that Agrawal will receive a $38.7m payoff, while Segal will get $25.4m.

After initially agreeing to buy Twitter for $44bn in April, Musk tried to get out of the agreement, raising concerns about the number of bots on the platform and allegations raised by a company whistleblower.

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However, the billionaire, who also runs Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted this morning that “the bird is freed”, in an apparent reference to the Twitter logo. He has also changed his Twitter biography to include the title “Chief Twit” and tweeted a video of himself arriving at the company’s headquarters carrying a sink. “Let that sink in!” he said.

“Musk does indeed plan to ‘liberate’ Twitter”, said TechRadar, but “perhaps not in any way that might improve the experience for the majority of its users”. This is because “more ads, less moderation” appears to be his “desired game plan”.

Although Musk has hinted there would be less moderation of what users put on the platform, he tweeted earlier this week that Twitter “obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!”

Musk has also talked about using Twitter to create “X, the everything app”, a reference to China’s WeChat app, which, explained The Verge, “started life as a messaging platform but has since grown to encompass multiple businesses, from shopping to payments and gaming”.