Billionaire Elon Musk tonight (Friday) officially completed the deal to purchase Twitter at a cost of 44 billion dollars. Immediately after that, Musk fired four of the company’s executives, whom he accused of misleading him about the number of spam accounts on the social network. Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that the fired are Twitter CEO Prag Aggarwal, CFO Ned Segal and the company’s senior legal counsel and head of the policy department, Vijaya Gada. According to the same sources, Aggarwal and Segal were at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco when the deal was completed – And they were taken out of the building.
The process of purchasing the company, which took more than six months, was particularly complicated and convoluted. At the end of March, Musk wrote that he was considering starting a competing social network. A few days later he was already the proud owner of more than 9% of Twitter. Later he offered to purchase it – Twitter tried to resist, but finally gave in. On April 25 it became official, Twitter approved the deal with Musk and it was agreed that he would buy it for $44 billion – and take it private.
Elon Musk’s Twitter: What is expected to change in the popular social network after the billionaire’s takeover? #The evening news @Yoav__Zehavi pic.twitter.com/u2AOY6qMwj
— here news (@kann_news) April 26, 2022
But no one had too much time to celebrate. Exactly three days after the sale was finalized, Musk’s regretful musings became public. The new Twitter owner has already started tweeting about a matter that bothered him – according to him the social network does not report the real number of fake accounts it has. Twitter claimed that it was less than 5% of the number of daily users, and Musk tweeted that the number was closer to 20%. From that moment he did not let the subject go.
Then the richest man in the world announced that he was freezing the deal, at the beginning of July he already canceled it and that’s how Twitter’s lawsuit was born, which demanded to force him to complete the deal, keep his word and buy it at the price he committed to.
Yesterday evening, the billionaire uploaded a letter he drafted for the advertisers on Twitter, a letter that hinted at a possible approach towards the desired purchase. In the letter, he wrote about what made him purchase the popular social network: “The reason I purchased Twitter is that it is important for the future of civilization to have a common digital ‘town square’ where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. Today there is a great danger That the social networks will become ‘sounding boards’ for the extreme right and extreme left, generating more hatred and dividing our society.”
Musk wrote that he didn’t buy Twitter because “it would be easy. I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to help humanity, which I love. I do it humbly and recognize that failure to achieve this goal is a real possibility.” He also wrote that Twitter cannot become a “hell open to all” space, where you can say anything without consequences. In his opinion, the platform should be open to all, and where each user can choose the experience he wants.