Elon Musk disbanded Twitter’s board of directors, the billionaire’s final administrative hurdle to transforming the platform into a beacon of free speech.
This move comes after the Tesla CEO said he planned on canning “around 50%” of Twitter’s staff, a claim Musk denied.
Musk’s $44 billion aggressive acquisition was finalized yesterday after the Securities and Exchanges Commission filed paperwork making him the “sole director of Twitter.” The official terms of the purchase reported by the Wall Street Journal show that Musk had no intentions of sharing power.
It was obvious Musk meant business after he immediately fired three high-level executives within hours of last week’s purchase.
Twitter’s board may be dismantled, but in the coming days, it appears Musk intends to out some members for hiding evidence.
Wachtell & Twitter board deliberately hid this evidence from the court. Stay tuned, more to come … pic.twitter.com/CifaNvtRtt
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022
There’s also good reason to believe he’ll continue trimming the fat. The New York Times reported that last week, Musk and his team met with Twitter’s top advisors in San Francisco to acquire intel on what each division does and who the “top performers” are.
Considering that Twitter employees will be compensated partially in stock grants starting November 1, the real question is how many workers will he send packing.
Musk made more headlines when he announced that Twitter will have a “content moderation council whose members will have “widely diverse viewpoints.”
He’s also expressed the possibility of charging high-profile names on the platform monthly fees to keep their blue-checkmark verification status active.
Taking complete command of Twitter has been a long road for the South African native.
In April, Twitter announced that Musk would be appointed to its 11-person board. Musk, who at that time owned 9.2 percent of the company, refused to join.
Former CEO Parag Agrawal, one of the three top executives Musk fired the day he bought Twitter, issued an ironic April 10 statement saying that his refusal to join the board was “for the best.” There’s good reason to doubt that Agrawal feels the same optimism towards this latest development with the Twitter board.
