Elon Musk completes Twitter purchase, immediately fires CEO and other execs
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)
Elon Musk completed the $44 billion purchase of Twitter today, capping a months-long saga that resulted in Twitter suing Musk to force him to honor their merger agreement. Musk's first course of business was to fire top executives.
"Musk fired Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal after the deal closed" on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal wrote. Twitter legal chief Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sean Edgett were also reportedly fired by Musk. It's not yet clear who will be the CEO under Musk's ownership.
Musk feuded with Agrawal while he was trying to get out of the merger contract. In August, he challenged the then-Twitter CEO to a public debate about Twitter's spam-account data. Twitter stuck with its lawsuit against Musk instead, and the court case helped force Musk to complete the deal. Musk had also posted tweets with criticism of Gadde's approach to content moderation.