Elon Musk’s first order of business after taking over Twitter is to push out its CEO and his lieutenants
3 min readTwitter Main Govt Officer Parag Agrawal is amid executives preparing to depart as Elon Musk completes his $44 billion deal to acquire in excess of the social community, according to men and women acquainted with the issue.
Also leaving are Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, coverage and belief Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, who joined Twitter in 2017 and Sean Edgett, who has been common counsel at Twitter because 2012, in accordance to people today common with the make a difference, who declined to be named because the information isn’t public.
Twitter didn’t promptly answer to a request for remark.
Agrawal stepped into the CEO part in November, when co-founder Jack Dorsey unexpectedly resigned. Agrawal had been at Twitter for just about a ten years, most just lately as chief engineering officer, but his operate as CEO was swiftly disrupted by Musk’s arrival as a significant shareholder and more and more vocal antagonist of its existing leadership.
After Musk confirmed up, it grew to become crystal clear that Agrawal was not likely to hold his work. “I really don’t have self-assurance in management,” Musk mentioned in one early submitting about the offer, and the two executives exchanged some general public swipes. In May, Musk replied to a Twitter thread from Agrawal defending the company’s consumer metrics by tweeting back again a poop emoji.
Text messages unveiled in the course of the lawsuit show that the two guys had a contentious exchange early on during the offer procedure just after Musk questioned his followers regardless of whether Twitter was “dying.”
Agrawal confronted him by using text. “You are totally free to tweet ‘is twitter dying?’ or nearly anything else about Twitter,” he wrote on April 9, “but it’s my duty to convey to you that it is not helping me make Twitter superior in the existing context.” Musk fired back again, “What did you get finished this week?” And then: “I’m not becoming a member of the board this is a squander of time.”
The adhering to 7 days, in messages with a mate, Musk mocked Agrawal for currently being on trip in Hawaii for the duration of deal negotiations. “Shouldn’t he be in a war area ideal now?!?” investor Jason Calacanis messaged Musk. “Does undertaking occasional zoom phone calls although ingesting fruity cocktails at the Four Seasons depend?” Musk replied.
Efforts by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to reconcile Musk, a longtime Dorsey buddy, and Agrawal right after the offer was announced also ended poorly. “At minimum it became very clear that you simply cannot operate jointly,” Dorsey messaged Musk after a team phone. “That was clarifying.”
Agrawal won’t be leaving vacant handed. As section of the deal, the CEO will vest 100% of his unvested fairness awards, according to a filing. Study organization Equilar approximated that usually means he’ll make an estimated $42 million, Reuters reported.
As Twitter’s head of lawful and plan troubles, Gadde has overseen the generation and enforcement of principles for hundreds of millions of online users, such as popular types that are subject matter to looser information constraints under the company’s exemptions for newsworthy posts or environment leaders’ communications. In obtaining Twitter, Musk has promised to transform it into a significantly less-restrictive platform for absolutely free speech, a shift he has explained is “essential to a operating democracy.”
Gadde was hit with a spate of online abuse earlier this yr following Musk publicly criticized written content-relevant selections at Twitter. The company permanently banned former US president Donald Trump in January 2021 next his supporters’ attack on the Capitol. Musk’s statements primary up to his acquire of the social-media organization have led lots of to anticipate the billionaire will restore Trump’s account and reinstate other people who have been blocked for breaking policies on offensive or harmful content material.
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