After Elon Musk completed his Twitter takeover, multiple reports and tweets from company employees suggested that he fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, general counsel Sean Edgett, and head of legal policy, trust and safety Vijaya Gadde were leaving the company immediately. Now he might take over the top job — at least for now.
A report from Bloomberg suggested that Musk will take up the CEO position, but will hand it over to someone else in the long term. As a CEO he will have to take care of different challenges like user growth, revenue growth and content moderation hurdles.
Agrawal, who took over from Jack Dorsey last year after the Twitter co-founder left the company, has had a strenuous relationship with Musk. The Tesla CEO famously tweeted a poop emoji in reply to Agarwal’s lengthy thread about spam on the platform. The process leading up to the Twitter v. Musk trial revealed a trove of texts between different investors and executives. While Agarwal and Musk began their conversation cordially, their relationship soured over time.
Bloomberg’s report also mentioned that Musk plans to lift lifelong bans on users. Twitter famously banned former President Donald Trump last year for breaking the platform’s rules and over the “risk of further incitement of violence” following the U.S. Capitol attack. This step of unbanning all users might draw mixed reactions across the political spectrum, and will test the billionaire’s efforts as to how far he wants to go to make Twitter the “digital town square” he wants it to be.
We have heard a lot about Musk’s ideas as the top man of Twitter. That included suggestions of building “X, an everything app” to monetizing tweets in different ways. There has been a lot of uncertainty around how the Tesla CEO will handle layoffs and restructure teams at the social network during the course of the whole takeover deal starting from April.
While Twitter’s CEO, CFO, and top lawyers were fired today, several top executives including former GM of consumer, Keyvon Beykpour and former revenue product lead Bruce Falck have left the company since Musk initiated the deal. Given so many empty seats at top management, Musk has to bring in some top talent to execute things he wants to achieve at Twitter.
