Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter officially began by removing the top executives from their positions.
Musk sacked three of Twitter's top executives within hours of finalizing a $44 billion agreement to acquire the firm on Thursday, signaling his intention to reshape one of the most powerful social media platforms in the world.
According to many media reports claiming people acquainted with the matter, Chief Executive Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, and Head of Legal, Policy and Trust Vijaya Gadde were all fired.
The Washington Post stated that Sean Edgett, Twitter's general counsel, also received the boot, citing an unnamed source.
Following Musk's termination, Agrawal and Gadde were reportedly both taken out Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, according to Reuters, which cited sources familiar with the situation.
The firings have not yet been formally confirmed by Twitter or Musk.Musk, a self-described "absolutist" of free speech, had a history of disagreements with the company's executives over their management of the social media platform.
The CEO of Tesla posted a meme in April that featured Gadde's face and said that the platform's moderation decisions were influenced by a left-wing bias.
Gadde has served as a focal point for protests from conservatives over Big Tech's repression of their ideas. The Indian-born businessman, who serves as Twitter's top legal, decided to permanently suspend former US President Donald Trump's account due to his alleged solicitation of violence during the riots at the US Capitol on January 6.
Musk and Agrawal engaged in a public spat in May when the Twitter CEO stated that it was impossible to estimate the actual number of spam accounts on the network. Musk responded to Agrawal's thread by tweeting a feces emoji. After accusing officials of hiding the amount of bots and spam accounts on the site, Musk tried to back out of his $44 billion purchase of the company. Terse conversations between the two men over the direction of the company were disclosed in text messages that were made public as part of Twitter's legal effort to uphold the original terms of the agreement.
Agrawal, who relocated from Mumbai to the US in 2005, was chief technology officer prior to succeeding Twitter founder Jack Dorsey last year. He described the company's mission as being to "concentrate less on thinking about free expression, but thinking about how the times have evolved" in an interview with MIT Technology Review in 2020.
Senior officials, including Agrawal, Gadde, and Edgett, were accused of ordering Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko to remove evidence of the company's lax cybersecurity rules in court filings submitted earlier this month, according to Musk's attorneys.
Musk has criticized Twitter's moderation standards and emphasized the need for a "common digital town square" where a variety of viewpoints can be discussed, while his exact plans for the social media site are yet unknown.
Conservatives have embraced Musk's purchase of Twitter as a remedy to what they regard as Silicon Valley's monopoly on political conversation online, despite critics' warnings that his acquisition could lead to an increase in hate speech and disinformation.
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