After months of back and forth, tech billionaire Elon Musk is taking over Twitter. As the first official act, he not only fires important executives of the company, but according to media reports also sees himself called to the boss.
According to a media report, tech billionaire Elon Musk initially wants to take over the top post himself after buying Twitter. He intends to replace Parag Agrawal, who was fired along with other key executives after the deal was completed, a source quoted by financial service Bloomberg as saying. Musk already changed the description to "Chief Twit" on his Twitter account. Twitter, Musk and the managers initially did not comment.
The radical approach does not come as a surprise to experts: "Musk will appoint directors who are well-disposed towards him, he will appoint a new management," law professor Adam Badawi of California's University of California, Berkeley, predicted. In the long run, however, Musk could give the top job back to someone else.
Because the tech billionaire already has his hands full as head of the electric car manufacturer Tesla and the space company SpaceX. He also leads smaller projects such as the tunneling company Boring Company and the research company Neuralink, which develops technologies to connect people and computers directly.
But not only top managers could get their hands on Twitter: The "Washington Post" recently reported that Musk wanted to lay off almost three quarters of the workforce after a takeover of Twitter. The billionaire therefore wants to reduce the number of employees from 7,500 to around 2,000. Such a clear cut could limit Twitter's ability to moderate content and protect networks and data.
According to the Bloomberg report, Musk also wants to implement his announcement that Twitter users will be freed from lifetime bans. The ex-US President Donald Trump, among others, is affected by such a ban - which according to previous information is irreversible. It is still unclear whether the abolition of the lifetime ban would also change Trump's position, according to Bloomberg.
In a Twitter video, Trump praised his supporters who stormed the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021. He was then banned from the platform. However, it's unclear if Trump would be allowed back on Twitter in the near future.
