Elon Musk Twitter Deal Completed, CEO and CFO Immediately Fired

[Achilles]

Elon Musk Twitter Deal Completed, CEO and CFO Immediately Fired

Musk tweets ‘the bird is freed’ after closing $44 billion deal and ousting CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal

Elon Musk Buys Twitter: A Timeline of the $44 Billion BattlePlay video: Elon Musk Buys Twitter: A Timeline of the $44 Billion Battle

Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, ending a monthslong saga over whether or not he would go through with his offer to acquire the social media platform. WSJ takes an inside look at the tweets, texts and filings to see exactly how the battle played out. Illustration: Jordan Kranse

By Lauren Thomas
and Alexa Corse

Updated Oct. 28, 2022 6:44 am ET

Elon Musk fired several Twitter Inc. executives after completing his takeover of the company, according to people familiar with the matter, capping an unusual corporate battle and setting up one of the world’s most influential social-media platforms for potentially broad change.

Mr. Musk fired Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal after the deal closed, the people said. Mr. Musk also fired Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top legal and policy executive, and Sean Edgett, general counsel. Spokespeople for Twitter didn’t comment.

Hours after those actions, Mr. Musk tweeted: “the bird is freed” in a seeming reference to Twitter, which has a blue bird as its logo.

WSJ Financial Editor Charles Forelle sits down with Alexa Corse, WSJ reporter covering Twitter, at 1 p.m. ET Oct. 28 to discuss Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. What does the future hold for the platform? And what does this deal mean for Mr. Musk’s business empire?

Mr. Musk first agreed to buy Twitter in April for $44 billion, then threatened to walk away from the deal, before reversing course again this month and committing to see through the acquisition. He previously indicated unhappiness with some of the top ranks at Twitter, at one point responding to a tweet from Mr. Agrawal with a poop emoji. He also used the site to mock Ms. Gadde, the top legal boss, tweeting an image overlaid with text that repeated allegations Twitter had a left-wing political bias.

It wasn’t immediately clear who would step into the top positions left vacant by Thursday’s exits. CNBC earlier reported the departures of Mr. Agrawal and Mr. Segal.

The deal, in which Twitter will again become a private company, adds to Mr. Musk’s expansive business reach, which also includes running Tesla Inc., the world’s most-valuable car company, and rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, among other endeavors. Mr. Musk, who had become Twitter’s largest individual shareholder, previously said he would pay for the acquisition mostly with cash, some contributed by co-investors, and $13 billion in debt.

There were signs this week indicating that Mr. Musk was moving closer to acquiring the social-media platform by Friday’s 5 p.m. deadline. Banks started sending money backing the deal, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Musk also has changed his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit,” showed himself walking into the San Francisco headquarters of the social-media platform, and issued a statement on Twitter explaining his vision for the site to advertisers.

Closing the deal ends a monthslong saga of whether Mr. Musk would or wouldn’t purchase the company. The deal also puts one of the world’s most prominent social-media platforms under the control of the world’s richest person, with implications for the future of online discourse.

tion in favor of emphasizing free speech. However, that approach risks causing conflicts with some advertisers, politicians and users who would prefer a more moderated platform.

In a message to advertisers on Twitter on Thursday, Mr. Musk said he was buying the company to “have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.” He said Twitter “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!”

Mr. Musk said the platform must be “warm and welcoming to all” and suggested Twitter could let people “choose your desired experience according to your preferences, just as you can choose, for example, to see movies or play videogames ranging from all ages to mature.”


Elon Musk, pictured in August, completed the deal for Twitter a day before a court-imposed deadline.Photo: Carina Johansen/NTB/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Mr. Musk’s decision to go through with the Twitter takeover came two weeks before a trial in Delaware was set to begin over the stalled deal. The judge presiding over the legal clash agreed to pause the litigation, granting a request by Mr. Musk for more time to complete the takeover. The judge gave Mr. Musk until Oct. 28 to follow through with his offer, or said she would schedule a November trial.

Mr. Musk offered in April to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share—higher than the company was valued at the time. In the months since the deal was struck, Twitter has faced efforts by Mr. Musk to abandon the deal, a whistleblower complaint in which Twitter’s former head of security accused the company of security and privacy problems, and unsuccessful talks to negotiate a lower price with Mr. Musk.

Mr. Musk’s takeover leaves big questions over the future of the platform, including how he might revamp its business model and how he might implement changes he has proposed for the way it polices content.


Twitter will be saddled with billions of dollars in debt as a result of the deal.Photo: Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press

Like other social-media companies, Twitter heavily relies on digital advertising and has faced headwinds in recent months due to broad economic uncertainty. It will also be saddled with billions in debt as a result of the deal, and payments on those loans will add costs for a company that has posted a loss in eight of its past 10 fiscal years.

The deal turned into a wild business drama with little precedent. Mr. Musk moved to buy Twitter in April. After signing a merger agreement, however, he accused the company of misrepresenting the prevalence of fake and spam accounts on its platform, which Twitter denied.

He formally tried to abandon the deal in July, prompting Twitter to sue him to enforce the original merger agreement. Mr. Musk countersued.

In early October, Mr. Musk suddenly abandoned his legal battle with Twitter, with little public explanation. After his reversal, he tweeted that “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” He previously suggested he could create a social-media platform named X.com if he didn’t buy Twitter.

Eric Talley, a law professor at Columbia University, said after the most recent about-face that several factors were piling up against Mr. Musk, including rulings from the court denying some of Mr. Musk’s discovery requests. Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, who was overseeing the case in Delaware, had called some of his data requests “absurdly broad.”


Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top legal executive, whom Elon Musk mocked on the site earlier this year, was among the ousted executives. Photo: Martina Albertazzi/Bloomberg News
“He has spent months with various attempts to figure out ways out of this deal,” Mr. Talley said. “All those windows had started to close and some of them closed completely.”

Mr. Musk’s specific plans for the company remain unclear. He could return Twitter to public ownership after just a few years, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

By taking Twitter private, the billionaire entrepreneur likely can take more risks to jump-start the company’s business. “It’s going to be bumpy,” said Youssef Squali, lead internet analyst at Truist Securities. “He can take it away for a couple of years, really kind of re-engineer the whole thing,” Mr. Squali said.

Mr. Musk has suggested he wants to shift Twitter away from its advertising-heavy business model to other forms of revenue, including a greater emphasis on subscriptions. Advertising accounted for more than 90% of Twitter’s revenue in the second quarter of this year.

He said he would allow former President Donald Trump back on the platform, though Mr. Trump has said he doesn’t intend to return to it. Twitter banned Mr. Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, citing what the company called “the risk of further incitement of violence.”

“Twitter is obviously not going to be turned into some right wing nuthouse. Aiming to be as broadly inclusive as possible,” Mr. Musk said in a message that was among a trove released as part of the legal battle.

The prospect of Mr. Musk taking over Twitter, as well as the subsequent uncertainty over the deal, roiled many Twitter employees. Twitter has told employees that they will hear from Mr. Musk on Friday, according to an internal note reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-mu...er-11666918031

[Lenno]

Elon Musk to ‘Do Away With’ Permanent Bans on Twitter Users, According to Report

[Lenno]

[Green Man]

Welcome to hell, Elon

You break it, you buy it.


By NILAY PATEL / @reckless
Oct 28, 2022, 9:02 AM EDT

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/...ech-moderation

You f**ked up real good, kiddo.

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.

The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. [emphasis added] So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World. So if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means: moderating more aggressively! Again, every “alternative” social network has learned this lesson the hard way. Like, over and over and over again.

Also, everyone crying about “free speech” conveniently ignores that the biggest threat to free speech in America is the ****ing government, which seems completely bored of the First Amendment. They’re out here banning books, Elon! President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have identical policy positions on Section 230: they both want to repeal it. Do you know why? Because the First Amendment prohibits them from making explicit speech regulations, so they keep threatening to repeal the law that allows social networks to even exist in order to exert indirect pressure on content policy. It’s not subtle!

State governments are even less subtle: both Texas and Florida have passed speech regulations that overtly tell social media companies how to moderate, in open hostility to the First Amendment. Figuring out how to comply with these laws is not an engineering problem (not least because compliance might be impossible). It is a legal problem because these laws are blatantly unconstitutional, and the only appropriate response to them is to tell the government to shut up and go away. (A big problem here is that the courts are pretty stupid about the internet!) A challenge to these laws, partially funded by Twitter, is headed to the Supreme Court, which is the polar opposite of a predictable system: it is a group of uncool weirdos with lifetime appointments that can radically reshape American life however it wants.

You can’t deploy AI at this problem: you have to go out and defend the actual First Amendment against the bad laws in Texas and Florida, whose taxes you like and whose governors you seem pretty fond of. Are you ready for what that looks like? Are you ready to sit before Congress and politely decline to engage in their content capture sessions for hours on end? Are you ready to do any of this without the incredibly respected policy experts whose leader you first harassedand then fired? This is what you signed up for. It’s way more boring than rockets, cars, and rockets with cars on them.


And it gets worse the second you leave the United States! Germany is a huge market for Tesla. Are you going to flout Germany’s speech laws? I would bet not. The Indian government basically demands social media companies provide potential hostages in order to operate in that country; you can’t engineer your way out of that shit. Are you ready to experience the pressure Twitter faces in the Middle East to block and restrict accounts? Are you ready for the fact that the Iranian government will ****ing murder people over their social media posts? (Are you ready for how Twitter is being used by Iranians protesting that government right now?) Are you excited for the Chinese government to find ways to threaten Tesla’s huge business in that country over content that appears on Twitter? Because it’s going to happen.

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.

Anyhow, welcome to hell. This was your idea.

[Lenno]

[Lenno]

Elon Musk’s Twitter Just Restored Kanye ‘Ye’ West’s Account

https://valiantnews.com/2022/10/elon-musks-twitter-ju

[lonewolfinoregon]

Welcome to hell, Elon

You break it, you buy it.


By NILAY PATEL / @reckless
Oct 28, 2022, 9:02 AM EDT

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/...ech-moderation

You f**ked up real good, kiddo.

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.

The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. [emphasis added] So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World. So if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means: moderating more aggressively! Again, every “alternative” social network has learned this lesson the hard way. Like, over and over and over again.

Also, everyone crying about “free speech” conveniently ignores that the biggest threat to free speech in America is the ****ing government, which seems completely bored of the First Amendment. They’re out here banning books, Elon! President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have identical policy positions on Section 230: they both want to repeal it. Do you know why? Because the First Amendment prohibits them from making explicit speech regulations, so they keep threatening to repeal the law that allows social networks to even exist in order to exert indirect pressure on content policy. It’s not subtle!

State governments are even less subtle: both Texas and Florida have passed speech regulations that overtly tell social media companies how to moderate, in open hostility to the First Amendment. Figuring out how to comply with these laws is not an engineering problem (not least because compliance might be impossible). It is a legal problem because these laws are blatantly unconstitutional, and the only appropriate response to them is to tell the government to shut up and go away. (A big problem here is that the courts are pretty stupid about the internet!) A challenge to these laws, partially funded by Twitter, is headed to the Supreme Court, which is the polar opposite of a predictable system: it is a group of uncool weirdos with lifetime appointments that can radically reshape American life however it wants.

You can’t deploy AI at this problem: you have to go out and defend the actual First Amendment against the bad laws in Texas and Florida, whose taxes you like and whose governors you seem pretty fond of. Are you ready for what that looks like? Are you ready to sit before Congress and politely decline to engage in their content capture sessions for hours on end? Are you ready to do any of this without the incredibly respected policy experts whose leader you first harassedand then fired? This is what you signed up for. It’s way more boring than rockets, cars, and rockets with cars on them.


And it gets worse the second you leave the United States! Germany is a huge market for Tesla. Are you going to flout Germany’s speech laws? I would bet not. The Indian government basically demands social media companies provide potential hostages in order to operate in that country; you can’t engineer your way out of that shit. Are you ready to experience the pressure Twitter faces in the Middle East to block and restrict accounts? Are you ready for the fact that the Iranian government will ****ing murder people over their social media posts? (Are you ready for how Twitter is being used by Iranians protesting that government right now?) Are you excited for the Chinese government to find ways to threaten Tesla’s huge business in that country over content that appears on Twitter? Because it’s going to happen.

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.

Anyhow, welcome to hell. This was your idea.

Well it is clear the "GREENMAN" hates real "FREEDOM OF SPEECH"!!!

Leads to me believe he knows his side can't defend their stance without "CENSOR SHIP"!!!

[Green Man]

The point of the article was that Musk can have unmoderated speech and little advertising revenue or moderated speech and lots of advertising revenue. He will have to choose.

Elon Musk has announced that he plans to form a “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints”

[jimmyb]

The point of the article was that Musk can have unmoderated speech and little advertising revenue or moderated speech and lots of advertising revenue. He will have to choose.

Elon Musk has announced that he plans to form a “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints”

So in a perfect world those of us on the right who are the victims of these advertisers trying to dictate what we should see and hear would be wise to find out who they are and begin boycotting their products immediately..

[Green Man]

Just cool it with the hate speech and Musk will probably be fine with it. More importantly, Twitter advertisers will be fine.