Aurich Lawson
Elon Musk today completed the $44 billion purchase of Twitter, ending a month-long saga that led Twitter to sue Musk to force him to honor their merger agreement. Musk’s first activity was to fire top executives.
Musk fired Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal after the deal closed, The Wall Street Journal reported. Twitter chief Vijaya Gadde and general adviser Sean Edgett were also reportedly fired by Musk. It is not yet clear who will be Musk’s CEO.
Musk argued with Agrawal while trying to get out of the merger contract. In August, he challenged the then Twitter CEO to a public debate over Twitter’s spam account data. Twitter instead stuck to its lawsuit against Musk, and the lawsuit helped Musk complete the deal. Musk also posted tweets of criticism van Gadde’s approach to content moderation.
Musk finalized the deal a day after visiting Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Twitter employees had circulated an open letter criticizing Musk after a Washington Post report said that “Musk had told potential investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to buy nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees.” reducing the company to a skeletal workforce of just over 2,000.” During his Twitter visit, he is said to have told staff that he will not fire 75 percent of them.
Twitter becomes a private company now that Musk has finalized the deal. He has said he buys Twitter to protect free speech, but he defines free speech in a way that suggests he is willing to restrict speech in any country where the government demands it.
Hours to complete the acquisition, Musk Posted a message to advertisers to reassure them that Twitter will not become a “free-for-everything hellscape.”
Fusion ends months of fighting
The deal was finalized a day before a court-imposed deadline. The saga began with Musk buying 9.2 percent of Twitter shares in March. Twitter then struck a deal with Musk to join him on its board of directors and forbid it to buy more than 14.9 percent of the company’s stock.
In a sign of things to come, Musk pulled out of that deal and began laying the groundwork for buying the company outright. He offered to buy Twitter in mid-April, claiming he wanted to preserve free speech on the platform.
Twitter executives quickly adopted a poison pill that made it difficult for anyone to buy more than 15 percent of the company’s stock in a “transaction not approved by the board of directors.” Musk continued his takeover bids, signing a deal with the Twitter board on April 25 to buy the company for $44 billion.
Musk’s reservations quickly emerged. On May 13, Musk said the deal to buy Twitter has been “temporarily put on hold” as he awaited details on the number of spam and fake accounts on the site. Twitter’s board stood their ground, saying it would “enforce the merger agreement”.
Musk spent the following weeks claiming that Twitter lied in its estimate that less than 5 percent of its daily active user revenue (mDAU) is spam or fake. He has never refuted the mDAU stats, but attempted to terminate the merger agreement on July 8, alleging that Twitter “made false and misleading statements on which Mr. Musk relied in entering into the merger agreement”.
