The sink came first. Two days before the deal closed, the world’s richest man posted video of himself strolling into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying one, grinning at his own pun: “let that sink in”. By Friday morning the joke had hardened into fact. Elon Musk ran Twitter.
The paperwork closed in the dark. Sources on the Thursday night, early Friday morning in the UK, could not say whether every document had been signed, only that the newcomer, born in South Africa, was in charge, and that the exits had already happened: Parag Agrawal, the chief executive, was out, along with Ned Segal, the finance chief, and Vijaya Gadde, the general counsel. The agreement, first struck in the spring, had been priced at $44 billion, about £38 billion.
The confirmation arrived in three words. In the small hours, shortly before 5am in the UK, he tweeted “the bird is freed”, and his long complaint about the platform, its policing of “free speech”, suddenly carried the force of ownership.
The road to that tweet had run through a courtroom. Musk spent months trying to walk away from the April agreement; Twitter sued to force the purchase through, and a US court had given him until Friday to close. He arrived with a message for advertisers as well, posted on the Thursday: he wanted the platform to be a space where “a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner”.
Inside the company, the mood did not match the humour. An internal memo, cited in several outlets, had him speaking to employees directly once the deal was finalised. Confusion and low morale had spread through the staff on fears of layoffs and of the company’s culture being dismantled; the leaders, at least outwardly, had spent the week welcoming the new owner. During the sink visit itself, he reportedly told workers it was not true that a cut of up to 75% was coming, though earlier reports had him telling investors he would trim around three-quarters of its 7,500 employees.
What came next was the question everyone inside and outside the company was asking. Musk had updated his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit”, a wink at the completed purchase. He had spoken of his belief in “absolute free speech” and of letting previously suspended figures, among them former US president Donald Trump, return to the platform, an idea that alarmed online safety campaigners. Reports suggested many staff planned to leave once the takeover was complete, and security campaigners warned the site could become an easy target for hackers as the deal settled and he began to restructure the firm.
His stated to-do list ran further: clearing the site of spam and bot accounts, and folding Twitter into a so-called “everything app” called X, a single home for services of every kind, the model being WeChat in China, where one application already handles social media, shopping, money transfers, taxi hire and restaurant bookings.
Sources
- Elon Musk completes $44bn Twitter takeover – Yahoo News UK
- BusySeed Reviews Twitter; The Ultimate Takeover: Elon Musk & Twitter
