Twitter’s “Chief Twit” Elon Musk fired CEO Parag Agarwal, Policy Chief Vijaya Gadde and two other senior executives as soon as he takes ownership of the microblogging and social media platform. Also, there was fear of a major layoff of around 75000 employees after Musk’s taking over Twitter. However, Musk has assured of no such layoffs to its advertisers.

On October 28, after a lot of back-and-forth from both parties for months, finally, Twitter announced that the merger between Elon Musk-owned entity and Twitter Inc was completed at $44 billion (approx. $54.20 per share).

Key points:

  • Elon Musk now owns Twitter, his first tweet “The Bird is Freed”
  • Musk sacked CEO Parag Agarwal, Policy Chief Vijaya Gadde and two other senior executives
  • Parag and Vijaya to get hefty compensation

Ever since the deal between Musk and Twitter started in April 2022, Musk had been raising issues about misleading information given by Parag Agarwal and other executives regarding fake accounts and the company’s investors.

According to Twitter’s SEC filing, the official numbers of how much Agarwal & Gadde will receive as part of compensation are Parag Agarwal would receive around $67 million (approx. Rs. 552 crores) and Vijaya Gadde is entitled to get around $54.7 million (approx. Rs. 450 crores) as now they been fired from Twitter. This sums up a total of around $120 million (approx. Rs. 1000 crore). As per SEC, Twitter’s deal with Musk, both of them will receive special compensation under “Golden Parachute Compensation“.

Apart from severance, Agarwal & Gadde hold direct shares of 128,753 worth $6,978,413 and 623,156 worth $33,775,055 respectively. Also, both of them are eligible for unvested and vested shares by Twitter.

Musk’s reason for buying Twitter is to promote free speech, to cancel out hate, division, violence and to limit censorship on this microblogging platform. On October 27, he tweeted – “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”

In a later development, a series of alleged chat exchanges between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and top Twitter executives – CEO Parag Agrawal, Founder and Former CEO Jack Dorsey and Bret Taylor- Chair of Twitter’s Board of Directors has been seen online. Twitter’s Internal Tech Email has shared these alleged chat and email messages.

Twitter is yet to announce its new CEO. Although, it would be interesting to see what the future holds for Twitter and how this microblogging and social media platform evolves after Elon Musk took over.

Featured Image Credit: Times Of India

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