Elon Musk Acquires Twitter for $44 Billion, Fires Top Execs

After all, Elon Musk has bought Twitter. As his first official act, he fired three of the top executives of the social media platform. Musk has taken over Twitter and CEO Parag Agrawal and two other top executives were soon fired.

Sources told The Washington Post that after they were fired, Agrawal, Twitter’s head of legal policy, trust and safety Vijaya Gadde and CFO Ned Segal were all put on a shuttle and taken away from the building. Sean Edgett, who was the general counsel for Twitter, was also let go.

Axios says that former CEO Jack Dorsey hired Gadde and that he was the one who decided to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform. The sale ends months of back-and-forth between the company and the 51-year-old founder of Tesla. In July, he said he was going to back out of his deal to buy Twitter.

It also comes after the billionaire businessman sent a letter to Twitter on Oct. 3 proposing to buy the platform for the price he agreed to pay for it in April: $44 billion, or $54.20 per share.

Bloomberg quotes a source who knows about the situation as saying that Musk decided to go ahead with the deal because his lawyers thought he would lose the case if it went to trial.

The Guardian says that trading in Twitter’s stock was stopped on October 4 after news of the deal drove up the price of the company’s shares by nearly 13%.

According to internal documents and interviews that The Washington Post used for a report that came out last week, Musk told potential investors that as owner, he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of the company’s 7,500 workers. This may make Twitter employees nervous about the sale.

Twitter sued Musk in July because it wanted to “compel” him to go through with the acquisition. In court documents that sources got at the time, Twitter said that after Musk agreed to buy the social media platform, he did so in “bad faith.”

“In April 2022, Elon Musk entered into a binding merger agreement with Twitter, promising to use his best efforts to get the deal done,” Twitter said in the complaint, filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery in July.

“Now, less than three months later, Musk refuses to honour his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests,” it continued.

“Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he — unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law — is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value and walk away,” the company claimed.

Musk pulled out of the deal to buy the company a few days before the lawsuit was filed. He said that Twitter “breached multiple provisions” of the original agreement.

Musk said that Twitter didn’t tell him and his team enough about how many fake accounts and bots were on its network for them to do their own investigation. Musk’s countersuit brought up these claims again, which Twitter denied.

Musk said he was “excited” about the purchase during a Tesla earnings call on Oct. 19. He said the platform has “incredible potential,” but he also said that he and other investors are “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now.”

“The long-term potential for Twitter in my view is an order of magnitude greater [than] its current value,” Musk added on the call, Insider reported.

When Twitter first said in April that it had “entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired,” Musk said he wanted to make the company “better than ever.”

“Twitter has tremendous potential,” he wrote in April, “I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

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