Immediately after taking over Twitter, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO fired the social media company’s CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, who was in the role of the legal affairs and policy chief
Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. (Credit: Tobias Kleinlercher/Wikipedia.org)
Elon Musk has completed the $44bn takeover of US-based microblogging and social networking service Twitter, nearly six months after announcing the deal.
The deal to acquire the publicly-listed microblogging platform was even scrapped midway in July by the American billionaire over a disagreement about fake accounts and bots on the platform.
Despite the termination, the deal was approved by Twitter’s stockholders in September 2022, which was the final preceding condition to the closing of the transaction under the merger agreement.
Musk and Twitter were also to face each other in the Delaware Court of Chancery after the latter filed a lawsuit to compel the billionaire to complete the acquisition.
Eventually, Musk said that he would go ahead with the deal at the original price of $54.2 per share in cash.
Immediately after taking over Twitter, Musk fired CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, who was serving as the legal affairs and policy chief.
After closing the deal, Musk took the social media platform to tweet “the bird is freed”, while calling himself Chief Twit in his Twitter profile. Musk is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
With the change in ownership, Twitter is set to be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. Founded by Jack Dorsey and others in 2006, the microblogging platform went public about seven years later in 2013.
As per Twitter’s last reported financial results, which was in July 2022 for the second quarter, the social media firm had a loss of $270m. This was in comparison to a net income of $66m in the same quarter of the previous year.
The average monetisable daily active usage (mDAU) in Q2 2022 for Twitter was 237.8 million.