Elon Musk confirms he’ll be new Twitter CEO as his team finalizes plans to layoff 25 percent

Billionaire Elon Musk said in an application Monday that he will become the chief executive officer of Twitter, the social media company he recently acquired for $44 billion.

Musk previously changed his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit” in a sign referencing the move.

It comes after Musk, who also runs Tesla and SpaceX, fired Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and other top company officials last week, making him the sole board member, according to a company filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. submits.

The following persons, who were directors of Twitter prior to the effective date of the merger, are no longer directors of Twitter: Bret Taylor, Parag Agrawal, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li and Mimi Alemayehou,” Musk said in the file.

Shortly afterwards, Musk tweeted that the move to dissolve the board is “only temporary,” with no further elaboration.

Over the weekend, Musk met with Twitter’s remaining senior executives to discuss the site’s future, along with plans to lay off 25 percent of its staff to begin with, reports The Washington Post.

Famed attorney Alex Spiro, who has represented Musk for several years, is said to have led the talks with several of the company’s teams, including legal, government relations, policy and marketing.

A few other longtime Musk employees David Sacks and Jason Calacanis also appeared in a business directory obtained by the Post with company emails and “staff software engineer” titles.

The team is now deciding which departments will be targeted in the first round of layoffs, which will lay off about a quarter of Twitter’s 7,000 employees.

Virtually no department will be left untouched when it comes to sales, product, engineering, legal, and trust and security. Some of the highest paid employees work in the sales department, and some bring in $300,000 a year.

The leadership team would ask questions about all aspects of the business, including everything from content moderation, spam and the risks of the upcoming election.

Identity verification is also high on the agenda, including authenticating high-profile users with blue checks. Last week, Musk closed a month-long saga with the acquisition of the social media company for $44 billion.

Since then, Musk has been quick to make changes at the company, which he had ridiculed for months for being slow to make product changes or delete spam accounts.

Musk’s teams began meeting with some employees to examine Twitter’s software code and understand how aspects of the platform worked, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Some employees said they received little communication from Musk or other leaders and used news reports to summarize what was happening at the company.

Musk is already driving major changes for the social media platform and testing the waters on asking users to pay for verification.

A venture capitalist working with Musk tweeted a poll asking how many users would be willing to pay for the blue check mark Twitter has used in the past to verify higher profile accounts so other users know it’s them.

Musk, whose account has been verified, replied, “Interesting.”

Critics have ridiculed the mark, often awarded to celebrities, politicians, business executives and journalists, as an elite status symbol.

But Twitter is also using the blue check to verify activists and people suddenly in the news, as well as unknown journalists at small publications around the world, as an additional tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts pretending to be people. .

“The entire verification process is now being revamped,” Musk tweeted Sunday in response to a user asking for help verifying.

Musk owns the social media service and has invited a group of friends and investors from the tech world to oversee the transformation of the San Francisco-based company, which is likely to cause an uproar from the workforce.

There has been uncertainty about whether and when he could begin large-scale layoffs.

“I think there will be a lot of layoffs,” said Matthew Faulkner, assistant professor of finance at San Jose State University. Faulkner noted the need for cost-cutting after Musk bought Twitter for a premium and the platform’s protracted struggle to make a profit. But Musk may also want to remove employees who don’t believe in his mission as soon as possible so that those who stay feel safer.

“You don’t want insanely scared employees working for you,” Faulkner said. “That doesn’t motivate people.”

Those who have revealed they are helping Musk include Sriram Krishnan, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who pledged in the spring to join Musk’s plan to buy the company and take it private.

Krishnan, who is also a former Twitter product manager, said in a tweet that it is “a hugely important company and can have a big impact on the world and Elon is the person to make it happen.”

Jason Calacanis, the venture capitalist who tweeted the poll about whether users would pay for verification, said over the weekend that he “hangs out on Twitter for a bit and just tries to be as helpful as possible during the transition.”

Calacanis said the team already has “a very comprehensive plan to reduce the number (and visibility of) bots, spammers and bad actors on the platform.” And in the Twitter survey, he asked if users would pay between $5 and $15 monthly to “get verified and get a blue check” on Twitter. Twitter is currently free for most users as it relies on advertising for its revenue.

Musk agreed to buy Twitter in April for $44 billion, but it wasn’t until Thursday night that he finally closed the deal, after his attempts to back out sparked a lengthy legal battle with the company.

Musk’s lawyers are now asking the Delaware Chancery Court to dismiss the case, according to a court made public on Monday. The two sides would appear in court in November if they hadn’t closed the deal late last week.

Musk has made a number of statements about how to fix Twitter since early this year, and it remains unclear which proposals he will prioritize.

He has pledged to ease some of Twitter’s content restrictions to promote free speech, but said Friday that no major content decisions or the reinstatement of banned accounts will be made until a “content moderation board” with different points of view. He later qualified that comment, tweeting “anyone suspended for minor and questionable reasons will be released from Twitter jail.”

The head of a cryptocurrency exchange that invested $500 million in Musk’s Twitter acquisition said he had a number of reasons for backing the deal, including the possibility of Musk turning Twitter into a cryptocurrency-supporting company and the concept known As Web3, many cryptocurrency enthusiasts see it as the next generation of the Internet.

“We want to make sure that crypto has a place at the table when it comes to free speech,” Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao told CNBC on Monday. “And there’s more tactical stuff, like wanting to help bring Twitter into Web3 when they’re ready.”

He said cryptocurrency could be helpful in solving some of Musk’s immediate challenges, such as the plan to charge a premium membership fee for more users.

“It can be done very easily, worldwide, by using cryptocurrency as a means of payment,” he said.