Elon Musk has taken control of Twitter.
The mega-billionaire’s $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter — following a six-month saga during which Musk tried to back out of the pact and Twitter sued to enforce the terms of his buyout — officially closed Thursday, as first reported by CNBC and followed by multiple reports. The world’s richest individual immediately fired several senior execs, including CEO Parag Agrawal; CFO Ned Segal; Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust, and safety; and general counsel Sean Edgett, the New York Times reported.
Representatives for Twitter did not respond to requests for comment. Musk, who currently has more than 110 million followers on Twitter, has not directly commented on the deal closing. His takeover ends Twitter’s nearly nine-year run as a publicly traded company, after it went public in November 2013.
In a tweet late Thursday, he said, “the bird is freed.”
What changes Musk might make now that he’s taken Twitter private are not clear.
Layoffs at Twitter appear likely — but Musk this week told Twitter employees that he does not plan to cut 75% of the company’s workforce, according to a Bloomberg report. The Washington Post reported last week that Musk previously told potential investors in the Twitter deal that he planned to lay off nearly three-fourths of Twitter’s staff, or about 5,500 employees.
In a tweet on Oct. 4, Musk said, “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” He didn’t elaborate, but he previously praised apps like TikTok and WeChat as models for what Twitter should become.
He’s also spit-balled a number of ideas like requiring all Twitter users to be authenticated and charging businesses a fee to use the social network. In addition, Musk has said he wants to make Twitter adhere to principles of “free speech” — and has accused the company of censoring conservatives. Liberal advocates are worried the right-leaning Musk may roll back Twitter’s policies restricting hate speech and misinformation, or reverse Twitter’s permanent ban on Donald Trump that was imposed because of his tweets during and after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Musk says most of the speculation about why he’s buying Twitter has been wrong — claiming he’s buying Twitter not “to make more money” but to “try to help humanity, whom I love.”
In a letter posted to Twitter Thursday morning, seeking to calm the fears of advertisers, he wrote, “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to 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.”
“Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Musk wrote. “In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences, just as you can choose, for example, to see movies or play video games ranging from all ages to mature.”
He added, “Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.”
Last week, on Tesla’s Q3 earnings call, Musk said, “Although, obviously, myself and the 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.”
Over the past two days, Musk has visited the company’s San Francisco offices; he also changed the bio in his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit” and set his location as “Twitter HQ.” On Wednesday, he posted a video of himself walking into the building holding a sink. “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” he tweeted. On Thursday, he retweeted a photo of himself at the Twitter headquarters’ coffee bar.
Also on Thursday, Musk brought in some Tesla engineers to Twitter’s headquarters to “review” the social network’s code and “assess and explain to Musk what the company needs,” Bloomberg reported.
Musk, a Twitter power user famous for sharing memes and jokes on the platform, was originally enthusiastic about the prospect of owning his favorite social network. “Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it,” Musk said on April 25, after reaching a binding agreement to buy the company for $54.20/share.
But then the stock market tanked. Within a few weeks, Musk decided he didn’t want to pay $44 billion for Twitter after all. Lawyers for Musk notified Twitter on three separate occasions, first on July 8, that he believed Twitter breached the terms of the acquisition agreement. He alleged the company made “false and misleading representations” to Musk, including underreporting the proportion of spam and bot accounts on Twitter. Each time, Twitter responded that Musk’s objections were “invalid and wrongful.”
Twitter sued Musk in Delaware Chancery Court to hold him to the original buyout price, and the company’s lawyers alleged Musk got cold feet after his personal net worth dropped with the decline in Tesla’s stock price.
In its lawsuit against Musk, Twitter alleged that the tech mogul had “repeatedly disparaged Twitter and the deal, creating business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price.” Indeed, Musk had belittled and undermined Twitter and its employees at least 16 times in tweets through mid-July, including replying with a poop emoji to then-CEO Agrawal’s thread explaining how Twitter estimates spam and fake accounts and posting a meme with photos of Gadde mocking Twitter’s purported “left-wing bias.”
Legal experts said Musk had a weak hand if the case were to go to trial, given the high bar needed to prove Twitter was in material breach of the original agreement. By early October, Musk reversed course after apparently realizing he would likely lose his legal fight with Twitter — and on Oct. 4, he notified Twitter the deal was back on.
The judge overseeing the case granted Musk’s motion to halt the trial until Oct. 28 to let him secure the debt financing he needed to close the deal, which he evidently succeeded in doing.
In Twitter’s final earnings report, for the second quarter of 2022, the company said its average monetizable daily active users increased by 8.8 million sequentially, to 237.8 million, up 16.6% year over year. Musk has criticized Twitter’s monetizable daily active user (mDAU) proprietary metric, alleging that it doesn’t accurately reflect the ad revenue generated from the social network’s user base.
Twitter’s Q2 revenue totaled $1.18 billion, down 1% year over year, which reflected “advertising industry headwinds associated with the macroenvironment” as well as “uncertainty related to the pending acquisition of Twitter” by Musk, the company said. Twitter costs ballooned 31% in the quarter, leading to a $270 million net loss.
