By Sana Fazili
Elon Musk has completed the$44 billion acquisition deal to take over Twitter ownership. The deal was finalised on Thursday, a day after he visited the Twitter headquarters in San Fransisco with a sink. Musk, the richest man in the world, now owns the social media platform after nearly six months of negotiations over the deal.
"The bird is free," Musk wrote on Twitter after the deal. Bird is the Twitter logo. Musk on Wednesday changed his Twitter bio to "Chief Twit".
"The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence," Musk said in an open letter to advertisers on Thursday.
"I didn't do it because it would be easy. I didn't do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love," he said. "Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!"
While Twitter earlier assured its employees that no layoffs would take place even after Musk's takeover of the platform, US media, includingReuters and Washington Post, have reported that chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde have been fired. Agrawal and Segal were escorted out of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters after the deal, Reuters reported.
Neither Twitter nor the allegedly fired employees have officially said that they have been asked to leave.
'Let that sink in'
Musk stunned everyone on Wednesday after he visited the Twitter headquarters carrying a sink. He was seen posing excitedly as he walked into the office. Twitter's new boss, Musk, shared the video on Twitter and wrote "Let that sink in".
Musk offered to buy Twitter in a $44 billion deal, for $54.20 per share on April 14, 2022. In retaliation to a hostile takeover, the Twitter board adopted a defence strategy called the "poison pill" which called for shares of the platform to be bought at a discounted price. On April 25, Twitter finally accepted Musk's offer to take Twitter private.
However, Musk on May 14 said that deal was "temporarily on hold" over Twitter's spam bots claims to which Agrawal responded on Twitter explaining the platform's spam calculation. He stated that they found less than 5% of its users being spam or fake accounts. Musk said that the deal cannot move forward unless information on the spam accounts is shared. A month later, in June, Twitter agreed to provide Musk access to its full "firehose" of all public tweets, to comply with his demands. Musk even met Twitter employees virtually, fielding questions about content moderation, free speech and more.
