On Thursday, the previous company boss Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal were fired, among others, the broadcaster CNBC and the “Wall Street Journal” reported on Friday night. The top manager Vijaya Gadde (annual salary $17 million) responsible for the fight against “hate speech and false information” was among those laid off, it said.
Musk ($219 billion) had Agrawal and the Twitter-Leadership repeatedly criticized in recent months. Agrawal and Segal were in the Twitterheadquarters in San Francisco when the deal was finalized and were escorted out, according to people familiar with the matter.
The transaction had to be completed by 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time (11:00 p.m. CEST) on Friday, otherwise the deal would still end up in court. A judge sat Musk and Twitter this deadline to finally settle the takeover after months of back and forth.
Musk had engineered the takeover himself, but then tried to do so, citing allegedly false information about the number of fake accounts Twitter getting out of the deal. Twitter dragged him into court – and shortly before the start of the Delaware trial, Musk agreed to Twitter at the originally agreed price of $54.20 per share. The fact that he made the cessation of the court case a condition caused uncertainty until the end. That Musk is still dealing with his new role as Twitter-Owner has resigned, has been apparent for days. Already on Wednesday he showed up at the corporate headquarters in San Francisco and identified himself in his Twitter-Profile now as “Chief Twit”.
According to US media, he wants to introduce himself to the employees there on a larger scale on Friday. This should not be an easy performance for him after Musk had publicly criticized the company and its management for months and recent reports of large job cuts caused uncertainty among employees. He is said to have rejected information that he wanted to throw out three quarters of the employees at headquarters this week.
