Elon Musk has completed his takeover of Twitter and fired several top executives, hours before the end of court-imposed deadline, according to media reports.
Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal have left the company, with Elon Musk now in charge of operations, US media reported.
CNBC citing sources said that both of them will not be returning, with Washington Post reporting that Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal policy, trust, and safety who made the decision to ban Trump’s account, was also fired.
The 51-year-old billionaire had until October 28 to complete his $44 billion acquisition deal or risk facing a trial in November.
In April, Musk had expressed interest to buy the microblogging site, but later retracted his offer in May.
He then again changed his mind after Twitter took legal action to force Musk to complete the deal.
Musk has been meeting with Twitter employees this week and is expected to address them on Friday.
Meanwhile, the social media platform’s shares have been suspended from trading on Friday, according to the New York Stock Exchange’s website.
Earlier, Musk reasoned that he bought Twitter to help humanity and wanted “civilisation to have a common digital town square”.
There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left-wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society,” Musk further added.
“In the relentless pursuit of clicks, much of traditional media has fueled and catered to those polarized extremes, as they believe that is what brings in the money, but, in doing so, the opportunity for dialogue is lost,” Musk said.
Earlier this week, the world’s richest man tweeted a video of himself walking into Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco carrying a kitchen sink with the caption, “Let that sink in!”
He also changed his Twitter profile to read “Chief Twit”.
(With inputs from agencies)
