After more than six long months of bouncing between “I’m most definitely buying Twitter” to “Nah, there’s too many bots”: Elon Musk has finally officially purchased Twitter.
According to Reuters, the first move Musk made in his brand new role as “chief twit” — the name he’s given himself in his Twitter bio — was to fire to the company’s CEO Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal as well as axing legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, who was reportedly behind the decision to remove former US President Donald Trump from the platform.
Agrawal and Segal were in Twitter’s headquarters when the acquisition was finalised, and were escorted out of the building by security. The New York Times also reported that Musk added general counsel Sean Edgett to the list of takeover-related casualties.
While the shakeup has caused a major stir across the headlines, the recently-fired executives probably aren’t too disappointed with their newfound employment status, with all of them receiving hefty payouts for their troubles. Insider reports that Agrawal was paid out US$38.7 million while Segal was given US$25.4 million and Gadde compensated US$12.5 million.
Musk buys Twitter
In his most recent tweet concerning the acquisition, uploaded 11 hours ago titled ‘Dear Twitter Advertisers’, Elon addressed some of the speculation around his reasoning behind the move, claiming that most of the commentary on the Twitter saga — which has been running since April 14 — has been “wrong”.
He reassured his 110 million followers that he didn’t acquire Twitter to “to make more money”. Instead, Musk said that he’d purchased the platform because,“it’s important to the future of civilisation to have a digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner”.
Saying that the social media company needed to undergo some massive changes, Elon sprinkled in a slightly poetic take on the takeover:
“I did it to try help humanity, whom I love”
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla
Musk also hinted that the social media platform would be looking to implement a way for creators to monetise their content in a short reply to a comment from British influencer and rapper Zuby.
Twitter will let users buy and sell NFTs on the platform
Alongside the massive Musk news, Twitter also revealed that users will soon be able to buy, sell and display NFTs on the platform through a partnership with four major NFT marketplaces.
The new addition, dubbed ‘NFT Tweet Tiles’, brings up NFTs in a dedicated window within a tweet and includes a button to let users click navigate through to its marketplace listing.
The integration is still in development but according to Twitter, it currently works with four main NFT marketplaces: the Solana-based Magic Eden, Flow-blockchain developer Dapper Labs, Ethereum-based Rarible, and cricket-focused Jump.trade.
Let that sink in
Earlier in the week the eccentric billionaire ruffled some feathers when he uploaded a video on the social media platform of him walking into the Twitter headquarters carrying a sink, complete with the caption “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in”.
While it could’ve just been a gag, business-minded commentators were a little concerned. In business circles “kitchen sinking” is a term that refers to throwing all your problems at someone at once.
Another major part of the acquisition deal will see Twitter become a private company, with Musk buying out existing shareholders at a price of US$54.20 per share for a total value of US$44 billion. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) will delist all Twitter (TWTR) shares effective from Friday.
