On Thursday, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter Inc. It took the first step in firing the social media company’s top leadership, accusing them of misleading him about the number of spam accounts on the platform. Musk fired Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and head of legal affairs and policy Vijaya Gadde, according to people familiar with the matter.
“The bird is released,” he tweeted, citing Twitter’s bird logo, an apparent nod to his desire to see the company less restrictive on what it can post.
However, the CEO of electric car maker Tesla Inc has also said he wants to prevent the platform from becoming an echo chamber of hatred and division.
Other goals include wanting to “defeat” spam bots on Twitter and make publicly available the algorithms that determine how content is presented to users. Musk, however, did not elaborate on how he would achieve this and who would run the company. He has said he plans to cut jobs, leaving Twitter’s roughly 7,500 employees worried about their futures.