Elon Musk has completed the acquisition of Twitter. The tech billionaire and owner of Tesla and SpaceX, among others, pays about 44 billion euros for the company. He says he plans to take the company off the stock exchange and wants to protect freedom of expression.
Musk announces the news himself on his profile; he tweeted this morning ‘the bird is free’, his location is ‘Twitter HQ’ and he calls himself ‘Chief Twit’. The latter probably has a double meaning, ‘twit’ means ‘fool’, but the entrepreneur probably also refers to a position within the company. Also CNBC and Insider have confirmation of the news through their own channels.
Musk is the first decision in his new position to fire CEO and CFO, Parag Agrawal and Ned Segal, respectively. According to The Washington Post The contracts of head of legal policy Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sean Edgett have also been immediately terminated.
Musk now owns Twitter, but months of conflict between him and the company preceded that. After buying a minority stake in the company, in April he offered to take over all of Twitter for 38 billion euros. The social medium opposed this in the form of a so-called ‘poison pill’ strategy. Nevertheless, he managed to get the board of directors to that extent, with a final amount of 44 billion euros. That amount has not risen in the meantime, but the exchange rate of the euro against the dollar has fallen from 1.08 dollars per euro to about 1 dollar per euro.
That seemed like the bullet through the church, but three months later the billionaire wanted to pause the takeover; he felt that Twitter was not clear about the amount of bots on the platform. You can’t make money from bots. Twitter then started a lawsuit against the man, because in their eyes he tried to get out of his contractual obligations.
The legal battle has been fought in a US courtroom in recent months. However, at the beginning of this month, it was paused, shortly before Musk had to testify himself, so that the two parties had time to execute the transaction anyway. That is now completed.
Twitter staff are reportedly concerned about the takeover. The Washington Post reported Elon Musk has told potential investors that he plans to lay off nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s workforce if the acquisition goes through. Of the roughly 7,500 workers, “just over 2,000” would remain, according to The Washington Post, meaning about 5,500 workers could leave. Musk denies this intention.
the bird is free
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022