Musk, who also runs rocket company SpaceX, brain-chip startup Neuralink and tunneling company Boring Company, fired former Twitter chief Parag Agrawal and other top company officials last week and proposed revisions to its user verification process platform, which was free. so far. In response to a tweet from author Stephen King that he wouldn’t be willing to pay $20 a month to keep his Twitter verified badge, Musk replied: “How about $8?” The billionaire said that establishing a price was the only way to defeat trolls and bots on the platform and that Twitter could not rely entirely on advertisers to pay its bills.
Only a member of the board of directors of the company
Musk announced his position as Twitter CEO in a securities filing. In another filing on Monday, Musk revealed that he became the sole director of Twitter as a result of the acquisition. Musk previously changed his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit” in a nod to his planned move. Twitter declined on Monday to comment on how long Musk might remain CEO or appoint someone else. “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 Lee and Mimi Alemayehu,” Musk said in the filing. Shortly afterward, Musk tweeted that the move to dissolve the board “is only temporary,” without elaborating. In response to a question he tweeted about what was “the most confusing thing on Twitter,” Musk tweeted Sunday that “it seems like there are 10 people ‘managing’ for every person coding.” Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter and was CEO before Agrawal, was pushed to step down from the top job at the company because investors believed he couldn’t do the job while also being CEO of Block Inc., which manages the Square payment platform. WATCHES | Musk’s takeover of Twitter has many users threatening to quit:
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has some users considering leaving the site
Some Twitter users say they are worried that Elon Musk’s plans to loosen moderation rules on the site will make it a hotbed of hate speech and abuse, and are considering quitting the social media platform before it goes sideways. On Monday, Nick Caldwell, general manager at Twitter’s Core Technologies, said on his Twitter bio that he was no longer with the company. Caldwell and Twitter did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment after hours. Since the acquisition, which closed last week, Musk has moved quickly to put his stamp on Twitter, which had been derided for months for being slow to introduce product changes or kill spam accounts. His teams began meeting with some employees to dig into Twitter’s software code and understand how aspects of the platform worked, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Some staff who spoke to Reuters said they had received little communication from Musk or other leaders and were using news releases to piece together what was happening at the company. Tesla stock has lost a third of its value since Musk proposed to buy Twitter in April, compared with a 12% drop in the benchmark S&P 500 over the same period.
