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Elon Musk is considering firing large numbers of Twitter employees on Saturday, according to a report – in order to stop them from receiving their November 1 stock grants.
Musk, 51, took control of Twitter on Thursday, on completion of a contentious $44 billion deal.
He immediately fired the CEO, chief financial officer, head of legal, and general counsel.
Musk has said he plans on trimming down the company and making it profitable, and ever since his takeover was first raised in April staff have braced themselves for job losses.
In a securities filing on April 14, Musk said he did not have confidence in Twitter’s management and initially vowed to sack 75 percent of the workforce when he formally bought the tech giant.
On Saturday, The New York Times said the losses could come immediately – in part to skirt the November 1 deadline.
Musk posted a video of himself marching into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a porcelain sink on Wednesday
On November 1, employees will be issued with stock – for many, a large part of their annual compensation package.
Musk could avoid making the grants if the staff are let go before then, the paper reported.
Four sources told the paper that some managers are being asked to draw up lists of employees to cut, as Musk tries to whittle down the staff numbers from its current 7,500.
Musk on Saturday did not discuss his plans – instead tweeting about the delights of bread, pastry and carbohydrates.
‘Finally, the truth that carbs are amazing can be said on this platform! #FreeSpeech,’ he tweeted.
He added: ‘#SoBrave’
Musk is believed to have ordered the cuts across the company, with some teams to be harder hit than others, said three of the people.
It was not clear how many people would be let go.
Just a day before being fired by Musk, Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde was photographed glaring at her new boss in an awkward meet-up with other employees at the HQ coffee bar.
Gadde, widely considered the ‘head of censorship’ at Twitter, had been vocal in her criticism of Musk; she cried during a meeting in April after he first announced plans to buy the company. She was a well-known Democrat donor and was behind the decision to squash links to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop before the 2020 election.
Musk had publicly slammed her for the decision.
On Wednesday, she was spotted with Musk and others at the coffee bar at Twitter HQ. The next day, she was fired along with CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal.
But she walks away with a sizeable payout – a total of $72million in stocks that she owned, salary and benefits, and stocks that had not yet vested when she was in her position but which are now paid out as part of the deal.
MarketWatch reports that Gadde, Agrawal and Segal take a combined ‘golden parachute’ of $204million; Agrawal gets $66million and Segal takes $65million.
Musk has not yet publicly named their replacements but he is expected to act as interim CEO at least on a temporary basis.
Friday also marked the return of Musk’s friend, Kanye West, to Twitter after the troubled rapper was suspended from the platform following a series of anti-Semitic rants on social media.
Elon Musk speaks with employees including fired top counsel Vijaya Gadde (left) on Wednesday after taking over at Twitter. She was responsible for permanently banning President Trump from the site – a move that Musk says he will reverse
Musk at the Twitter coffee bar yesterday. He has vowed to fire 75 percent of the staff – to the dismay of many senior employees
There’s a new sheriff in town: Elon Musk tweets on Friday morning after taking over the company
As Musk ushered them out last night, he asked Tesla engineers to visit HQ today to start rewriting the website’s code.
Among his plans is to open source algorithms to increase transparency for users about how their data is used to suggest content to them, and to add an ‘edit’ button for all.
He also plans to allow President Trump back on the site.
Trump welcomed his takeover on Friday, writing on his own social media site Truth Social: ‘TRUTH SOCIAL has become somewhat of a phenomena.
‘Last week it had bigger numbers than all other platforms, including TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest.
‘It also looks and works better to my eye. I am very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands, and will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country.
‘Twitter must now work hard to rid itself of all of the bots and fake accounts that have hurt it so badly.
‘It will be much smaller, but better. I LOVE TRUTH!’
Conservative figures who were banned from the platform now hope that his stated commitment to free speech will allow them to return.
The big names booted from Twitter include Donald Trump, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Among those who have decried his plans as dangerous is the former head of global public policy, Colin Crowell.
He left Twitter in 2019, long before Musk had designs on the site, but told The New York Times: ‘It’s a ‘back-to-the-future’ reversion to content rules circa 2010, but one that ignores the lived experience over the last decade.
‘People eventually realize that the Wild West needs a sheriff, both for ensuring the safety of citizens but also for enhancing the prospects for commerce.’
Twitter shares have risen steadily throughout the week in anticipation of the takeover, but they will be halted on Friday on the NYSE.
Musk plans to take the company private – a move that will somewhat shield him from the regulation and bureaucracy he faces with a publicly traded company.
Twitter’s former top lawyer Gadde, who earned $17 million in 2021, was reportedly in tears in April when Musk’s takeover first came to light. She has now been paid out $12.5 million for her troubles, Insider said.
Ex-CFO Segal – who was the man behind Mr Trump’s Twitter ban – also received the handsome sum of $25.4 million after being fired by Musk on Thursday evening.
And former CCO Sarah Personette was handed $11.2 million as part of Musk’s house clearance.
Despite Musk’s obvious delight with the astonishing deal which will go down in history, some experts have claimed that he has ‘overpaid’ for the platform.
Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, told the US Sun that the deal ‘will go down as one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in the history of M&A deals on the Street in our opinion’.
Ives, who works for an LA-based investment firm, estimates the value of the company to be closer to $25billion rather than the $44billion.
‘With fair value that we would peg at roughly $25billion, Musk buying Twitter remains a major head-scratcher that ultimately he could not get out of once the Delaware Courts got involved,’ he said.
In the lead-up to the South African’s buyout of the social media firm, the market positively reacted, with share prices visibly improving.
They went up by 7.23 per cent in the last five days and were up about 1 per cent at $53.94 in early trading on Wednesday.
Sean Edgett (left), the general counsel, and Ned Segal, chief financial officer for Twitter (right), have also reportedly been fired
Sarah Personette (left) tweeted on Wednesday that she was excited to work with Elon Musk – and was fired by him the next day
The stock has surged nearly 65 percent from a four-month low hit in July.
However, after Musk’s purchase, the New York Stock Exchange’s website showed that Twitter shares would be suspended from trading.
The South African publicly criticized Twitter’s existing leadership team – in particular, attacking their policies on content moderation and censorship. He has also sparred with them over data on how many accounts were bots or spam.
This deal completion comes at the eleventh hour – just one day before Musk was going to be dragged back into court after being sued by Twitter for a back-and-forth he had over whether he was going to buy the company.
On Wednesday, the billionaire changed his Twitter profile to identify himself as the ‘Chief Twit’ and posted a video of himself walking into the company’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a porcelain sink.
This fueled rumors that Musk had closed the deal to buy Twitter in which he shared the clip with the caption: ‘Entering Twitter HQ, let that sink in’.
The platform’s co-founder Biz Stone confirmed their departures last night
Agrawal, who took over from founder Jack Dorsey almost a year ago, has been at loggerheads with Musk over the number of genuine Twitter users, with Musk responding to a thread of Agrawal’s in May with a ‘poop’ emoji.
When Musk first made his takeover bid in April, he said he had not been given accurate data about spam accounts and bots.
Three months after launching his bid, Musk pulled out – insisting he had been misled about the size of the firm.
Twitter has for years said that bots make up less than 5 percent of its ‘monetizable daily active users’ (mDAU).
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