After finalising his $44 billion acquisition deal of Twitter on Thursday and firing its chief executive Parag Agrawal and other top executives, Elon Musk now plans to take over the role, a source familiar with the matter said, requesting anonymity to disclose internal deliberations.
The billionaire is expected to stay CEO in the interim but may eventually relinquish the position in the long run, according to the source.
Musk also aims to do away with permanent user bans since he does not believe in lifelong prohibitions, according to reports. That implies anyone who was previously banned from the platform may be able to rejoin, though it was unclear if that included former president Donald Trump, the source was quoted by media as saying.
Notably, when former US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was permanently disabled following the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Musk called the ban morally wrong and “flat-out stupid” and promised to reverse it.
Representatives from Twitter have, however, declined to respond to the matter.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk took control of Twitter on Thursday, months after making the first attempt to buy the social media business in April this year. On Thursday (October 27), Elon Musk visited Twitter headquarters, carrying a ceramic sink. He shared a video of his entry with the caption “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!”
Today, a day after the $44-billion deal came to fruition, Tesla CEO Elon Musk fired top executives of Twitter Inc. including CEO Parag Agrawal and its legal Head Vijaya Gadde. Besides Agrawal and Gadde, the company’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Ned Segal was also fired for misleading the Tesla CEO and the investors about fake accounts on Twitter.
Elon Musk had vowed to eliminate spam bots from the micro-blogging site, protect Twitter from becoming an eco chamber for hate and division and make algorithms open-sourced.