Elon Musk has finally gone through with his buyout of Twitter, which he was forced to close on after going back and forth on it.
On his first day as Twitter’s owner on Thursday, Musk fired the company’s CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and its legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.
Twitter had filed suit against Musk to push him to complete the deal, and he apparently began preparations to do so so just a day before he was set to go to trial in Delaware for it.
Musk’s vision for the platform likely involves less content moderation, a war on a supposed army of spam bots that he tried to use as an excuse to back out of the deal, and the potential reinstatement of controversial banned accounts such as Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia).
Musk has already said publicly he would like to bring Trump back to Twitter, but the former President may hold firm and stay on his own platform, Truth Social.
There’s a decent chance he may not be able to resist given how hopelessly addicted he was to tweeting before and during his Presidency. He was permanently banned over inflammatory tweets he wrote about the 2020 election after the January 6 riots that Twitter determined further questioned the results.
Though he is also clearly still trying to play ball with wealthy advertisers, as his recent statement titled “Dear Twitter Advertisers” repeated his desire for Twitter to be a free “digital town square” but also wrote “Twitter cannot become a free-for-all hellscape,” whatever that means.
He also made an odd comparison by saying users should “choose your desired experiences, according to your preferences, just as you can choose, for example, to see movies or play video games ranging from all ages to mature.”
